The Family Bible Project and other related projects

 

https://yanceyfamilygenealogy.org/family_bible_index.htm

When I am working with the FamilySearch.org family tree, I routinely check the sources for any individual. Over the years, I have a noticed that there is a distinct trend to rely almost solely on birth, marriage, and death records (BMD records) with a sprinkling of census records. When officially kept, BMD records disappear in U.S. records, usually by the middle of the 19th Century,  and most inexperienced researchers are lost and entries with either no BMD information or only estimated information is entered. Here is an easily discovered example of an estimate with missing information. 

Here is a screenshot of the one source cited. 

What if you were to find a Bible record for this family? 

Family Bibles are valuable resources for genealogists because they often contain handwritten records of important family events, such as births, deaths, and marriages. These records can include dates, names, and locations. Family Bibles can also provide information about a family's history, such as the names of all the children in a family and their fates. They can also provide hints about unknown or missing ancestors.

Family Bibles were especially popular in the 1700s and 1800s. Families would pass them down from one generation to the next. The records in family Bibles can serve as proof of parentage in the absence of a vital or church record.

Some of the most valuable ancient Bibles in the world include the Codex Sassoon, Gutenberg Bible, Bay Psalm Book, and 1616 King James Bible. These rare artifacts provide insight into theological history and are highly sought-after investments.

Sources for the quote:'

Google Chat

Shakshober, Jennifer. 2022. “Locating Family Bible Records.” Vita Brevis (blog). August 29, 2022. https://vitabrevis.americanancestors.org/2022/08/locating-family-bible-records/.

“United States Bible Records.” 2022. FamilySearch Wiki. October 13, 2022. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/United_States_Bible_Records.

What if you had a centralized location to a vast number of Family Bible records?

The answer to this question is that we do have such a series of websites that provide links to tens of thousands of Bible records. 

Here are a few of the links that are part of the Family Bible Project that includes the screenshot and link at the beginning of this post.

https://yanceyfamilygenealogy.org/family_bible_index.htm

https://yanceyfamilygenealogy.org/family_bible_index_Locations.htm

https://yanceyfamilygenealogy.org/sampler.htm

https://yanceyfamilygenealogy.org/family_bible_resources.htm

https://yanceyfamilygenealogy.org/Famous_People_and_their_Bibles.pdf

There is also a ongoing project to find more bibles listed in the JustSearve.org website.

https://www.justserve.org/projects/9748464b-8272-4e31-8bcd-e8727b0db72d/family-bible-project?shiftId=1920c6cc-4f0c-445f-b76e-81309ef8ba05

You can also find out more about this project by clicking on the following link:

https://yanceyfamilygenealogy.org/family_bible_chasers.htm

Here are a few ideas about the value of research into Family Bibles that showed up in a search in ChatGPT:

Family Bibles hold significant value for genealogy and family history research. They are often cherished heirlooms that provide valuable insights into a family's past. Here are several reasons why family Bibles are valuable for genealogy and family history:

Record Keeping: Many family Bibles contain handwritten records of births, marriages, and deaths within the family. These records can provide crucial information for genealogists, such as names, dates, and sometimes even locations.

Primary Sources: Family Bibles serve as primary sources of information. They are typically created at or near the time of the event they record, making them highly reliable for genealogical research.

Missing Links: Family Bibles can fill in gaps in official records. In cases where vital records (birth, marriage, and death certificates) are missing or incomplete, the information in a family Bible can help bridge these gaps.

Personal Touch: The handwritten entries in a family Bible often include personal notes or details that may not be found in official records. These can provide insights into family relationships, nicknames, or other anecdotal information.

Visual Documentation: Some family Bibles include photographs, newspaper clippings, or other ephemera that offer visual documentation of family members or events. This can add depth to your family history research.

Cultural and Historical Context: Family Bibles can reveal cultural and historical context. They may contain inscriptions or notes related to significant historical events, family migrations, or religious beliefs, which can help you understand your ancestors' lives better.

Emotional Connection: Family Bibles often hold sentimental value, and they can create a personal and emotional connection to your ancestors. Reading the same Bible that your great-grandparents used can be a powerful experience.

Authentication: In some cases, family Bibles can be used to authenticate other genealogical records or oral family traditions. They can serve as evidence to support the accuracy of other information you uncover during your research.

Preservation: Family Bibles may also be valuable from a preservation perspective. They often contain historical and cultural information that can be lost if not properly cared for. Digitizing or conserving a family Bible can ensure it remains a resource for future generations.

Sharing and Connecting: Family Bibles can be a way to connect with living relatives who may have information or memories to share. Sharing the information from a family Bible can lead to fruitful discussions and collaboration with other family members interested in genealogy.

While family Bibles are invaluable resources, it's essential to remember that they can also contain errors or omissions. Cross-referencing the information found in a family Bible with other records, such as census data, church records, and official certificates, is crucial to ensure the accuracy of your genealogical research.

By the way, I don't find it any different to quote ChatGPT, especially when it develops such good information when I have routinely used Wikipedia in the past.  

Using Adobe Photoshop BETA, Adobe Phoshop and MyHeritage.com and Reimagine to repair a photo

This photo of one of my uncles has severe damage to the lower left. The question was, can I repair the photo using Adobe Photoshop BETA and artificial intelligence? The process is simple. I upload the photo, use the lasso tool to circle the damaged part of the image and then click on generate. 

This is the results of the process that takes about 15 seconds. 

 

Next, the question becomes, what would the MyHeritage.com image editing apps do to the same damaged image. The damage turns out to too much for MyHeritage. The difference of course is that Adobe Photoshop is a professional level photo editing program. Here is what MyHeritage was able to do with the damaged photo. 

What if I take the MyHeritage.com improvements back into Adobe Photoshop?

This is the photo using both the MyHeritage.com photo tools and the Adobe Photoshop BETA version to edit the photo. There is a small white dot on his mouth. Can that be repaired in Photoshop?

I don't know if you can tell, but the spot is gone with the Spot Healing Tool from Adobe. Now, MyHeritage.com has recently released a new mobile app that has the photo tools from the main website. The app is called Reimagine. I shared the image with my iPhone and used the Reimagine app to repair, enhance, and colorize the image. The app had all the same tools, with the same results as the desktop web-based program. 

The key here is that the enhancement and colorization would not be happening in Photoshop. 

Introducing ConnecticutGenealogy.org, a FREE searchable database

 

Quoting from an email announcement:

Hello again from Reclaim The Records! Today, we come into your e-mail with a long-awaited present: millions of new free genealogy records -- or at least, new searchable and downloadable indices to those millions of records, and helpful instructions on how you can order the underlying certificates, even very recent ones. And of course, we also have yet another Kafkaesque story about why the world is still missing public access to even more years of this great data, and how we're working to fix that.

Introducing ConnecticutGenealogy.org! It's a FREE searchable database of 576,638 births, 2,180,700 marriages, 2,086 civil unions, and 2,772,116 deaths from the state of Connecticut, spanning three centuries. Some of this data had been online before, scattered across several other websites, but with fewer years, in non-downloadable and non-shareable formats, locked behind paywalls, and/or with tools that couldn't handle searching the quirks and oddities in the data very well. Well, now it's all in one place, and we think we've got better data and better tools, and we're here to tell you all about it!

In addition, 

ConnecticutGenealogy.org includes the first-ever online publication of Connecticut birth index data from 1897-1917, and this new data is the only statewide index of Connecticut births that exists publicly online anywhere. (Yay!) We also acquired marriage and death index data from 1897 through 2017, while the next most complete online version of the index only had data through 2012. And our search engine is set up to better handle some of the weirdness in this data, such as the official records from 1969-1979 only having the first five letters of each person's given name, and some of the pre-1925 data missing some names entirely. Our search engine also has all the fun bells and whistles like automatic nickname and partial name searches, wildcard searches, automatic typo or letter transposition searches, date range searches (even down to the exact day, not just the year), and so on.

And we even geo-coded all the data, and we also auto-supplemented all the data with county names. 

Its been a while since I heard from Reclaim the Records and it is nice to see that they are still working away at liberating records.  

MyHeritage's Reimagine Image Editing on your SmartPhone

 Some time ago, in May 2023, MyHeritage.com announced the new Reimagine App. Reimagine is a groundbreaking new mobile app for family photos developed by MyHeritage. It is available on both iOS and Android platforms. The app harnesses the power of MyHeritage’s world-class AI technologies for improving historical photos and boasts a powerful photo scanner that enables high-speed scanning of entire album pages. 

Reimagine is a one-stop-shop where you can scan, improve, and share your photos, and indulge that sweet sense of nostalgia. The app comes with a state-of-the-art, multi-page scanner feature developed by MyHeritage’s AI team. This enables quick and easy scanning of entire album pages or multiple standalone photos in a single tap. The scanner then uses cutting-edge, cloud-based AI technology to automatically detect the individual photos and crop them, saving hours of work traditionally required with other scanners.

Scanned photos are saved in an album within the app and backed up to an account on MyHeritage. In just a few taps, an old, damaged black and white photo can be scanned and beautifully restored, enhanced, colorized, and even animated. The improved photos, or their original scanned versions, can easily be shared with family and friends on social media or through your family site on MyHeritage.

Reimagine currently supports 11 languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Portuguese (Brazil), Swedish, Norwegian, Italian, and Finnish. Additional languages will be added in the future. You can download Reimagine from the App Store or Google Play.

PhotoDater™ from MyHeritage: Another Amazing Technological Advance

 

You can read about all the details of this amazing addition to the MyHeritage.com arsenal of photographic innovations in this blog post: "Introducing PhotoDater™, an Exclusive, Free New Feature to Estimate When Old Photos Were Taken."

Here is a quote from the blog post:

If you are like most genealogists, you probably have cherished old family photos whose details, such as when they were taken, remain a mystery. Perhaps you flipped them over hoping to find more details, only to discover that your ancestors who treasured these photos didn’t leave any information behind. Until now, missing details about your photos could have remained a mystery forever, but here at MyHeritage, we set out to find a solution. Today we’re excited to announce the release of PhotoDater™, a groundbreaking, free new feature that estimates the year a photo was taken, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology.

PhotoDater™ is one-of-a-kind: MyHeritage is the only genealogy service that offers date estimation for historical photos. Using powerful technology developed by our AI team, PhotoDater™ gives its best guess when a photo was taken. This can help you unlock further clues about who appears in the photo and the event at which it was taken, to solve mysteries in your genealogy research. PhotoDater™ is completely free!

I tried it out on several different photos and having spent most of my life involved in photography, I was still impressed with the estimates. I currently have more than 13,000 media items on MyHeritage.com, so it is unlikely that I can date all of them, but having this tool will be a help in identifying unknown individuals and giving dates to a series of photos of one individual or family. This feature was mentioned at RootsTech 2023 earlier this year and it is really great to finally see it in action.  

Free Access to 38,518,064 eBooks and Texts

Archive.org

The Library of Congress is usually acknowledged as the "largest or most extensive library in the world." Here is a Google Generative AI quote about the Library of Congress with some links to sources. 

The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. is the largest library in the world. Basic Planet, Veena World, +6 more It's the national library of the United States and contains materials in over 450 languages. Bustle The Library of Congress has a budget of over $600 million per year and a catalogue of over 160 million items. Veena World, Koha library system cloud hosting & support – KohaSupport It's made up of four buildings, with enough room to accommodate as many as 30 million books. Basic Planet

As of the date of this post, the Internet Archive or Archive.org has 829 billion webpages, 38, 518, 064 million books and texts, 10,532,859 movies, films and videos, 15,505,536 Audio files, 2.6 million TV shows (mostly newscasts), 1,026,649 archived software programs, 4,713,159 images, 244,024 concerts in its live music archive, and 1,829, 180 assorted media files. This collection is entirely free and completely searchable, and it also dwarfs the collections of the Library of Congress.

So why aren't you using the Internet Archive for genealogical research? Think about it. 

Hint: The most efficient way to search the Internet Archive is using Google searches. 

Just for interest's sake, here is a quote from Google's Generative AI about the collections in the Internet Archive.

As of January 1, 2023, the Internet Archive holds more than 36 million print materials, 11.6 million pieces of audiovisual content, 2.5 million software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.5 million images, 251,000 concerts, and over 808 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library that offers free access to books, movies, music, and archived web pages. Wikipedia, archive.org

If you compare the numbers I extracted from the website as of the date of this post, you can see how fast some parts of the website are growing. But, you can also question the accuracy of an AI search if you want.  





 

Introduction to the 10 Million Names Project

 

https://10millionnames.org/

Quoting from the Project website:

10 Million Names is a collaborative project dedicated to recovering the names of the estimated 10 million men, women, and children of African descent who were enslaved in pre- and post-colonial America (specifically, the territory that would become the United States) between the 1500s and 1865.

The project seeks to amplify the voices of people who have been telling their family stories for centuries, connect researchers and data partners with people seeking answers to family history questions, and expand access to data, resources, and information about enslaved African Americans.

This is an ongoing project and will likely be in the news for an extended time. You can see some of my recent videos about African American research as follows:

The Great African American Migration 

Part One: The Great Northward Migration 1915-1970 Overview and Methodology for Beginning Research

There are five more videos on the RootsTech.org website.