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Genealogy News Bytes – 16 August 2019
Some of the genealogy news and education items across my monitor the last three days include:
1) News Articles:
* Ancestry.com Owners Aim to Extract $900 Million Payout With Loan
* GeneaWebinars Calendar
* Free Family History Library Classes and Webinars for August 2019
* Fisher’s Top Tips: #97 – Connecting
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Recently Added and Updated Collections on Ancestry.com
From the Ancestry.com list of recent additions at https://www.ancestry.com/cs/recent-collections:
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8/7/2019
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8/7/2019
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Looking into a Busy Tavern
In a discussion with Kurt Manwaring, Vaughan Scribner described his book Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society and offered this word picture of Henry Wetherburn’s tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia (shown above in its current form):
I especially like this tavern because of its diversity—it had the “Bullhead Room” for elites, the “Middle Room” for the middling sorts, and the “Great Room” for mixed companies (mostly the lower classes).
From the historical record, an ordinary evening would include a group of elitist colonists locking themselves in the Bullhead Room for a club. They would probably say this club is erudite and exclusive, but by late in the evening this group of men would probably be drunk and disorderly, spilling out into the Great Room for bumpers and sociability.
In the Great Room, meanwhile, a diverse set of ordinary colonists would have crowded the bar, asking for sloshing bowls of rum punch and tankards of local ale.
There probably would have been a fiddler in one corner, while in another corner a group of slaves waited for their masters to finish in the Bullhead Room or Middle Room.
Wetherburn’s female servants would have flitted among the male crowd, yelling back at them and telling them how it was.
Like colonial American society, tavern interactions were confused and complicated, resting upon ad-hoc communications more than established notions of hierarchy and order.
Scribner argues that in the eighteenth century taverns “were basically the internet, bank, hotel, restaurant, bar, auto-repair shop, brothel, and library all in one.”
Announcing: DearMYRTLE’s new blog "Myrt’s Musings"
DearREADERS,
Yup! I’ve taken the plunge and designed a new blog called Myrt’s Musings. It will include all the news, hangouts announcements and opinionated moderating my DearREADERS have come to expect.
So head on over to
Frankly, I’ve had a ball experimenting with Wordpress. After consulting with 3 experts, we realize its impossible to import my old DearMYRTLE’s Genealogy Blog posts over without a ton of broken links. It had something to do with a custom domain redirect. Yikes!
P.S. Genea-friend and fellow GeneaBloggerTRIBE member Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings said it’s ok if Ol’ Myrt here uses the word “musings.” I’m guessing he doesn’t have a copyright on the use of that word.
P. P. S. – I’ve got a whole new color scheme. Wonder if that means I’ll need to make a new quilt backdrop for our upcoming hangouts? Hmmmm.
Happy family tree climbing!
DearMYRTLE,
Your friend in genealogy
and now
http://hangouts.DearMYRTLE.com
http://bit.ly/DearMYRTLEonGoogle
Hangouts: Pay what you want. So it’s simple. If you value the work Ol’ Myrt, +Cousin Russ and our beloved panelists do week in and week out on your behalf, please:
Check the DearMYRTLE Hangouts Calendar for upcoming study groups and hangouts. There you’ll find links to the GeneaConference (in-person) and the GeneaWebinars Calendar with over over 200 hours of online genealogy classes, webinars, live streams and
tweetchats from other hosts and presenters over the next 12 months.
Norman Miller, Wilmington Daily Record, Google Chrome, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 6, 2019
NEW RESOURCES
University of Wisconsin-Madison: New Online Archive For Africanist Norman Miller. “The Norman Miller Archive is a new open multimedia resource featuring selected research, photos, films, journals, books, and field notes from the library of Norman Miller, an academic researcher, journalist, and film producer who worked extensively in East Africa from 1960-2015.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
DigitalNC: The Daily Record Project: “Remnants” of a Pivotal Paper in North Carolina’s History. “About two years ago, we had the honor of hosting a group of students from Wilmington who were studying one of the most politically and socially devastating moments in the state’s history–the Wilmington Coup and Race Riots of 1898. Their efforts centered around locating and studying the remaining issues of the newspaper at the center of that event, the Wilmington Daily Record. Owned and operated by African Americans, this successful paper incited racists who were already upset with the political power held by African Americans and supporters of equality. During the Coup, the Record’s offices were burned and many were killed. Thanks to these students, their mentors, and cultural heritage institutions, you can now see the seven known remaining issues of the Daily Record on DigitalNC.”
The Register: Googlers hate it! This one weird trick lets websites dodge Chrome 76’s defenses, detect you’re in Incognito mode . “A week ago, Google released Chrome 76, which included a change intended to prevent websites from detecting when browser users have activated Incognito mode. Unfortunately, the web giant’s fix opened another hole elsewhere. It enabled a timing attack that can be used to infer when people are using Incognito mode.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
CNBC: How Facebook failed to break into hardware: The untold story of Building 8. “Building 8′s experience highlights Facebook’s central quandary as it seeks to diversify beyond mobile ads, which account for 93% of revenue, and expand into the costly business of developing, manufacturing and selling consumer devices. Coding is Facebook’s DNA, but the company’s hacker culture clashes with the realities of hardware development, which demands longer time horizons and relationships with a wide swath of manufacturers and resellers, all issues well beyond Facebook’s core.”
The Atlantic: Where Everyone’s an Influencer. “The occasion was Instabeach, an exclusive, invite-only annual party hosted by the photo-sharing platform for 500 top creators along with plus-ones, talent representatives, managers, and—for the first time—press. The goal, according to Justin Antony, Instagram’s head of creators and emerging talent partnerships, is to help influencers meet one another, mingle, and form friendships. But what started three years ago as a casual beach party for a class of people that was once maligned by the traditional entertainment industry has become a who’s who of young Hollywood, a sun-soaked declaration of just how completely enmeshed Instagram has become with the teen-entertainment world.”
TechCrunch: Facebook still full of groups trading fake reviews, says consumer group. “Which? says it found more than 55,000 new posts across just nine Facebook groups trading fake reviews in July, which it said were generating hundreds ‘or even thousands’ of posts per day. It points out the true figure is likely to be higher because Facebook caps the number of posts it quantifies at 10,000 (and three of the ten groups had hit that ceiling).”
SECURITY & LEGAL
ZDNet: Microsoft: Russian state hackers are using IoT devices to breach enterprise networks. “One of Russia’s elite state-sponsored hacking groups is going after IoT devices as a way to breach corporate networks, from where they pivot to other more high-value targets. Attacks have been observed in the wild said the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center, one of the OS maker’s cyber-security divisions.”
New York Times: Legal Shield for Websites Rattles Under Onslaught of Hate Speech. “When the most consequential law governing speech on the internet was created in 1996, Google.com didn’t exist and Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old. The federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, has helped Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and countless other internet companies flourish.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
TechXplore: Study explores interactions between world leaders on social media. “Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) have recently carried out a study investigating the interactions among different world leaders and influential political figures on social media. Their findings, pre-published on arXiv, provide interesting new insight about how government actors use social media, which could help to better understand the role of new technologies in diplomatic exchanges.”
Cornell Chronicle: Study finds racial bias in tweets flagged as hate speech. “Tweets believed to be written by African Americans are much more likely to be tagged as hate speech than tweets associated with whites, according to a Cornell study analyzing five collections of Twitter data marked for abusive language.” Good afternoon, Internet…
Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!
Announcing: DearMYRTLE’s new blog "Myrt’s Musings"
DearREADERS,
Yup! I’ve taken the plunge and designed a new blog called Myrt’s Musings. It will include all the news, hangouts announcements and opinionated moderating my DearREADERS have come to expect.
So head on over to
Frankly, I’ve had a ball experimenting with Wordpress. After consulting with 3 experts, we realize its impossible to import my old DearMYRTLE’s Genealogy Blog posts over without a ton of broken links. It had something to do with a custom domain redirect. Yikes!
P.S. Genea-friend and fellow GeneaBloggerTRIBE member Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings said it’s ok if Ol’ Myrt here uses the word “musings.” I’m guessing he doesn’t have a copyright on the use of that word.
P. P. S. – I’ve got a whole new color scheme. Wonder if that means I’ll need to make a new quilt backdrop for our upcoming hangouts? Hmmmm.
Happy family tree climbing!
DearMYRTLE,
Your friend in genealogy
and now
http://hangouts.DearMYRTLE.com
http://bit.ly/DearMYRTLEonGoogle
Hangouts: Pay what you want. So it’s simple. If you value the work Ol’ Myrt, +Cousin Russ and our beloved panelists do week in and week out on your behalf, please:
Check the DearMYRTLE Hangouts Calendar for upcoming study groups and hangouts. There you’ll find links to the GeneaConference (in-person) and the GeneaWebinars Calendar with over over 200 hours of online genealogy classes, webinars, live streams and
tweetchats from other hosts and presenters over the next 12 months.
The American Ancestry of Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Is Revealed by American Scholar
The following announcement was written by American Ancestors, also known as New England Historic Genealogical Society:
Johnson is Related to at Least Ten U.S. Presidents and Many Notable U.S. Political Figures
August 1, 2019—Boston, Massachusetts—Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the British Prime Minister, has Turkish, Jewish, noble German, and much English ancestry. However, the extensive American ancestry of the newly-elected head of the U.K. government is much less known.
Gary Boyd Roberts, Senior Research Scholar Emeritus at American Ancestors, also known as New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), has studied the American forebears and notable kin of Johnson and published his recent findings on AmericanAncestors.org.
The new Prime Minister has family relationships with ten U.S. Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush—and to many political, industrial, and cultural icons in America’s history.
Johnson’s American ancestry is rooted in New England, largely in Connecticut and Massachusetts, which includes a seventeenth-century Connecticut immigrant of royal descent, Elizabeth (Alsop) Baldwin, a cousin of Queens Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I—and the ancestors of many American presidents and of the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
According to Roberts, the Prime Minister’s mother, Charlotte Offlow Fawcett, was a daughter of Sir James Edmund Sandford Fawcett, president of the European Commission of Human Rights, and Frances Beatrice Lowe, daughter of paleographer Prof. Elias Avery Lowe, formerly Loew, of Russian Jewish descent, and Helen Tracy Porter, who used the surname Lowe-Porter and was the first English language translator of Thomas Mann. Helen’s parents Henry Clinton Porter Jr. and Clara Holcomb lived in Towanda, Bradford County, Pennsylvania, but their ancestry was completely New England or Long Island Yankee. The surnames of Helen’s eight great-grandparents were Porter, Frisbie, Betts, Warner, Holcomb, Bailey, Noble, and Tracy; new surnames in the previous generation were Clark, Twitchell, Means, Crowfoot, Scoville, Vorce, and Wells. Among the maternal Frisbie ancestors, the above Elizabeth (Alsop) Baldwin was a great-great-great-granddaughter of Alice Boleyn, wife of Sir Robert Clere and aunt of Queen Anne Boleyn, mother of Elizabeth I.
Other New England ancestors include Rev. John Lathrop, founder of Barnstable, Mass., and ancestor of Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush; Samuel Smith of Hadley, Mass., forebear of the founders of Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges, and of Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, Grover Cleveland, and again George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush; Nathaniel Foote of Watertown, Mass. (the family was later of Wethersfield, Conn.), ancestor of Presidents William Howard Taft, Richard M. Nixon, and, once more, Hayes and the two Presidents Bush; and Thomas Lord of Hartford, an ancestor of Presidents Herbert Hoover and Gerald R. Ford. Another ancestor of Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, via Skinner and Porter, was John Strong of Northampton, Mass., ancestor of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who was one-eighth American.
Gary Boyd Roberts has undertaken considerable research on notable descendants of Rev. John Lathrop and John Strong. Lathrop descendants include U.S. First Ladies Edith Kermit (Carow) Roosevelt and Nancy (Davis) Reagan; Canadian Prime Minister Sir Robert Laird Borden; the traitor Benedict Arnold; politicians William Jennings Bryan, Thomas E. Dewey, John Foster Dulles, and George and Mitt Romney; poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and Jr.; inventor Eli Whitney; financier J. P. Morgan Jr.; artist Georgia O’Keeffe; composer Charles Ives; Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints founder Joseph Smith Jr.; Cecil B. DeMille and Agnes de Mille; aviator Amelia Earhart; and, among actors, Julie Harris, Clint Eastwood, Cissy Spacek, and Ben and Casey Affleck. Among Strong descendants are Franklin D. Roosevelt; First Lady Bess (Wallace) Truman; the patriot Nathan Hale; Senators Henry Cabot Lodge II and “Jay” Rockefeller; tycoons John Pierpont Morgan Sr. and Jr.; the Pillsburys of Minneapolis; architect Daniel Hudson Burnham; art patron Isabella Stewart Gardner; and actors Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Glenn Close, and Brooke Shields.
Johnson’s descent from Frederick I, King of Württemberg, 1754–1816, whose wife was a great-granddaughter of George II, King of Great Britain, 1683–1760, has been well explored online, largely by Richard Carruthers-Zurowski on his blog at VadeMecumGenealogy.blogspot.com.
Several graphic charts detailing some of the key findings of this research on the American ancestry of Boris Johnson by Gary Boyd Roberts can be found on the website of American Ancestors at https://www.americanancestors.org/about/press-and-media/press-releases/boris-johnson.
Call For Presenters: Ontario Ancestors Conference & Family History Show 2020
The following announcement was written by the Board of Ontario Ancestors:
The Board of Ontario Ancestors (OGS) is delighted to announce that the 2020 annual conference will take place on June 5-7 at the Hamilton Convention Centre. The Conference Committee is already hard at work behind the scenes, planning an inspiring event under the banner, “Finding the Past – Moving into the Future.” Ontario Ancestors continues to boast the largest membership of any Canadian family history organization with its conference attracting speakers and attendees from across the globe.
The Program Committee invites proposals for Workshops and Lectures on:
- How to conduct research in repositories and how technology can help
- How to use technology to preserve items from the past
- Finding items from the past while moving into the future: Using eBay, YouTube, blogging, social media, etc.
- How to use technology to improve your research skills
- Using DNA in your research
- How to be a better ancestor for our own descendants
- How to research First Nations and Métis family history
- Country specific research such as Canada, United Kingdom and Ireland, Europe, etc.
- Other topics will be considered that fit the Conference theme
Speakers will receive an honorarium alongside appropriate expenses and complimentary Conference registration. Please submit your proposals by email to the address below. Please include:
- Your full name
- Contact details including mailing address, telephone number, email address, and website address (if applicable)
- Biographical information, including recent speaking credits (no more than 150 words)
- For each proposal please provide a unique title, a summary of 250 words maximum, identify the intended audience (Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced) and specific A/V requirements. Multiple proposals are encouraged.
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: 29 August 2019
To submit proposals or ask questions, please contact the Conference 2020 Program Committee at: ruth.blair@ogs.on.ca. For more information about Ontario Ancestors, please visit: http://ogs.on.ca.
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