Heralding the new year!
This week's newsletter focuses on a genealogy blogpost, archives, and family history
Hello everyone! Happy new year!
I’d like to mention, first, and foremost, of how online content doesn’t last forever, the process of accessioning in archives, investing in institutional archives, and the push for expanded machine learning. With that, let me begin.
With that, let me note some interesting articles I read which relate to the archives field. For one, the American Archivist editorial board formally apologized for that awful article by Frank Boles, pledging to create a more inclusive SAA and Brandi Oswald wrote on The Unwritten Record (run by staff in NARA’s Special Media Archives Services Division) about mapping the Battle of Tennessee, noting various archival resources which are available on the topic. I also enjoyed reading, this past week, a post by David Langbart, an Archivist in the Textual Records Division at the National Archives at College Park, about automation in the U.S. State Department in 1966 and Spencer Howard’s post about one of the 27 journalists who accompanied President-Elect Herbert Hoover on his “Good Will Tour” of Latin America in November and December 1928. Additionally, the post by Caitlin Hucik, an Archives Technician in the Motion Picture, Sound and Video Branch at NARA, focusing on the Berlin Wall and an article by Jonathan Marker about three photo historians combed through National Archives holdings to compile a book of photographs taken by World War II military photographers.
Next, I’d like to point to my family history post focusing on Elizabeth, the wife of Samuel Packard, one of the primary Packard ancestors. This is the beginning of future posts which will focus on female ancestors rather than male ones, which I’ve talked about before. It reminds me of other blogposts that focus on municipal archives and dragging genealogy information out of your family members. Even Good Housekeeping had an article about preserving family history storytelling! I am very glad to hear that FamilySearch is adding the ability to document same-sex relationships, but when will FamilySearch let you add enslaved people as a form of a relationship? As it currently stands, if one of your ancestors was a slaveowner, you CANNOT add enslaved people as one of their relationships, meaning that if the enslaved person has a profile on FamilySearch, they can’t be connected to your ancestor. Its awful.
That’s all for this week! Hope everyone has a great rest of their week!
- Burkely