The 1890 Census - Not Everything Was Destroyed

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

Beginning U.S. genealogists soon learn that the 1890 census records were destroyed in a fire in the basement of the Commerce Building on January 10, 1921. Many people who would like to see these records just shrug their shoulders and move on.

In fact, census fragments for 1890 in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota, Texas, and the District of Columbia survived and are available now.

Additional story at: https://blog.eogn.com/2019/07/15/the-1890-u-s-census-not-everything-was-destroyed/

How Photo Retouching Worked Before Photoshop

 

BY JOCELYN SEARS JULY 28, 2016

This is the first installment in a short series of articles on photo manipulation in the days before computers.

In 1841, the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot patented the calotype—the first practical photographic process to create a negative that could generate multiple copies. Just five years later, in 1846, the first known act of photographic retouching was performed by a Welsh colleague of Talbot’s named Calvert Richard Jones, or perhaps by one of Jones’s associates. Jones had taken a photograph of five Capuchin friars on a rooftop in Malta, but while four of the friars were clustered together talking in a group, the fifth hovered a few feet behind them, framed awkwardly against the sky. Jones, or an associate, didn’t like the way this fifth friar was interrupting the scene, and so blotted out the figure on the paper negative using some India ink. In the positive print, the place where the fifth friar had stood became white sky.

Additional story at: 

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/83262/how-photo-retouching-worked-photoshop?fbclid=IwAR3jR1JGw12777yUxaG95iZEcObBpyFi0IRlbZ12APGtopY-ADz4tFiCUoY

(photo/Reditt.com)

More focus on DNA studies

New Caledonia's indigenous rebuff DNA research
Researchers trying to trace the DNA of indigenous peoples have been rebuffed in New Caledonia.
According to the public broadcaster, New Caledonia's customary Senate, which represents the territory's Kanak people, has turned down bids by German and French researchers to obtain DNA samples.
The Senate said the DNA did not belong to any individual but to a clan.
Studies of the human genome have already been carried out in Fiji, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea to try to reconstruct migratory patterns in the Pacific.
(www.radionz.co.nz)

Ancient DNA shows Asian farmers first Pacific people
A professor from New Zealand's Massey University has proven farmers from Asia were the first people to settle in the Pacific, thousands of years ago. The research, which has been published in the journal, Nature, comes from DNA extracted from 3000-year-old skeletons in Vanuatu and Tonga.
It refutes the belief that early Pacific settlers were of predominantly Papuan ancestry.
One of the co-authors of the research, Professor Murray Cox, said the research could bring about health improvements for Maori and Pasifika people by helping scientists better understand their genetic makeup's.

"By understanding what genes they got from where and what those genes do we hope to have a better understanding of what is happening in these populations today and from that, better healthcare outcomes."
(www.radionz.co.nz)