The following annoumcement was written by Findmypast:

With the release of four new record sets, we’re taking a trip to South Africa this week.

Church records and membership lists document over 350 years of South Africa’s history and people in our latest release. With records from the Cape, Free State, Kwazulu-Natal, and Transvaal regions, is there a South African branch of your family tree waiting to be explored? Plus, we’ve added over 102,000 pages to our newspaper archive.

South Africa Baptisms

Spanning 1660-2011, over 785,000 new baptism records offer essential information about your South African family heritage. Some entries include a digitized scan of the original record, which is always worth checking for extra details, like godparents’ names. Where available, the original record is likely to be written in Dutch or Afrikaans.

South Africa Marriages

Did your ancestor tie the knot in South Africa? Find out in over 314,000 new church marriage records.

The records reveal the names and birth years of both spouses, as well as when and where their wedding took place.

South Africa Burials

Trace South African ancestors from cradle to grave with the help of over 4,800 new burial records.

From its indigenous people to European colonization and apartheid, South Africa’s history is as diverse as it is tumultuous. Could these records help you trace a family connection there?

South Africa Church Membership Lists

Detail-rich records reveal when your ancestor joined the church, along with important biographical facts. The 141,000-strong collection includes membership lists from Cape and Free State.

Hot off the press: Over 102,000 more newspaper pages

We’ve added Morecambe Visitor to our newspaper archive this week, alongside updates to 24 other papers. Here’s a full rundown of what’s new:

New title:

Morecambe Visitor covering 1900, 1917, 1952-1954, 1956-1962, 1964-1968 and 1987

Updated titles:

Filter by title and date when searching to focus on the updates that interest you most.

We released even more baptism, marriage and burial records last week. If you missed them, you can catch up on what was featured here.

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman. 

A newsletter reader recently posted a comment about some articles I have written explaining why the cloud is good for genealogy and for many other purposes. The newsletter reader protested, “You constantly tout that cloud storage is much more secure than local device based storage. Yet, we constantly hear about celebrities, companies and national and state governments whose files have been hacked and published.”

Yes, indeed, there have been major security problems with government and corporate data servers. However, these problems usually do not occur on cloud computing services. The problems all arose (to my knowledge) from hackers accessing old-fashioned servers in data centers, not from true cloud services that use encryption. The cloud is not the same thing as a server in a data center. 

To be sure, cloud computing is not radically different from single servers. Instead, the thing generally called “the cloud” is an outgrowth, or advancement, of single servers. Many enhancements have been added to the concept of single servers, and improved security is one of the enhancements that is usually included. In most cases, a cloud-based service provides much higher security than does a single server or a group of servers in a data center. Improved security isn’t automatic; the company providing the cloud services must add security to the service. However, given the large number of servers involved in a cloud service, improved security is almost always included.

The US government apparently still uses many servers that are not cloud-based and are vulnerable to attacks from hackers around the world. Many corporations do the same. Use of cloud technology isn’t a perfect solution but it is far better than running single servers or even groups of servers in a non-cloud environment, the way that all companies and government agencies did a few years ago.

Explanation

Cloud computing means that, instead of using the power of your desktop computer, or the power of a server somewhere inside your company’s network, the computing power is provided for you as a service, often provided by another company, and is accessed over the Internet, usually in a completely seamless way. Exactly where the hardware and software is located and how it all works doesn’t matter to you, the user—it’s just somewhere in the nebulous “cloud” that the Internet represents.

NOTE: Many large corporations, the US military, and some others create their own privately-owned clouds. However, individuals and most small to medium-sized businesses contract cloud services from third-party vendors, such as from Amazon Web Services, Apple, Cisco, Citrix, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace, Salesforce.com, Verizon, and other cloud service providers.

Cloud computing is a buzzword that means different things to different people. For some, it’s just another way of describing IT (information technology) “outsourcing”; others use it to mean any computing service provided over the Internet or a similar network; and some define it as any bought-in computer service you use that sits outside your firewall. However we define cloud computing, the normal definition of “the cloud” is data processing services provided by banks of servers, often located in multiple data centers around the world.

In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive. The cloud is just a metaphor for the Internet. However, that simplistic explanation does not provide any clues concerning the increased security available with most cloud-based services.

One major difference is the cloud is not a single server in a remote data center. Just because you access a service online on the Internet does not mean you are accessing a cloud service. If your employer owns one mail server and it is installed in the company’s data center, that mail service is not running in the cloud. In contrast, Google’s Gmail service runs on thousands of mail servers that are located in a dozen or more data centers around the world. The various data centers constantly back up the information in the other data centers. If any one server or even if one entire data center goes offline for some reason, the backup servers located in the other data centers around the world will take over and continue normal operation within seconds. The user sees little or no interruption.

The remainder of this article is reserved for Plus Edition subscribers only. If you have a Plus Edition subscription, you may read the full article at: https://www.eogn.com/(*)-Plus-Edition-News-Articles/13313300

There is an interesting article by Leah Hendry published in the CBC News web site that may be of interest to many genealogists:

As more police forces crack decades-old cold cases with the help of genetic genealogy, Montreal police have yet to have a major breakthrough on a case of their own.

The lack of progress — at least publicly — is raising concerns about the Montreal police department’s priorities at a time when both the Sûreté du Québec and neighbouring Longueuil police have used new forensic methods to solve cases long thought to be unsolvable.

Last spring, Longueuil police solved the 1975 murder of Sharron Prior and in 2022, Quebec provincial police tracked down the man suspected of killing Guylaine Potvin, a 19-year-old slain in Saguenay nearly 24 years ago. He is now on trial for first-degree murder and sexual assault.

Both cases analyzed Y chromosome DNA — which traces paternal ancestry — to help match an unknown profile with a potential family name. Armed with new leads, police then used traditional policing techniques to zero in on a suspect.

Stéphane Luce runs a non-profit organization that raises awareness of unresolved missing persons and murder cases in Quebec. He says it’s about time Montreal had a win.

The Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) created a cold case unit in the spring of 2019 which now has eight investigators.

“With this new technology it could be a good thing for the investigators to put their nose in a file and find out if there’s DNA and good DNA to be worked on,” said Luce, president of Meurtres et Disparitions Irrésolus du Québec.

Stéphane Gauthier was kidnapped on his way to meet his mother and her boyfriend in Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood on Dec. 21, 1982. (Meurtres et Disparitions Irrésolus du Québec)

Luce’s organization has pushed the SPVM to re-examine several unsolved murders, including that of 12-year-old Stéphane Gauthier, who was abducted and murdered just before Christmas in 1982.

Luce believes Gauthier’s case is a perfect candidate for advanced genetic testing because unidentified DNA was found at the crime scene.

You can read the full article at: http://tinyurl.com/bdp2ehak