The Match – Sri Lanka DNA adoption project 🧬

Can environmental DNA help us find lost US service members? – Environmental DNA. 🤔 Might help with Army cases.🤞

A new study explains why Starbucks can’t spell your Jewish name – Really interesting article. And I had never heard of an Aroma name. 😂

Populism Updates on Twitter – Weird thing to wake up to. For those on Twitter, there’s a discussion on research I did back in 2008 determining who would be King of America if George Washington had been King instead of President.

And anyone curious about the sleuthing, here’s an article I wrote (BTW, would be different now since the UK changed its law of succession in 2013).

Research Buzz Search Gizmos – Hey, y’all, In case you’re not familiar with Tara Calishain, the one-person guru behind ResearchBuzz, I’d like to suggest that you check out some of her latest tools designed to help us dig deeper and faster in our research efforts.

They’re all free (some require API keys, but the keys are also free) and there’s no advertising.

Currently there are 15 gizmos, and while I encourage you to poke around and play with all of them, Tara was kind enough to highlight a few she thinks might be most useful for genealogists:

Smushy Search – Adds contextual query words to a Google topic search (in other words, try this when you’re researching a topic that’s new to you – will help you get past a lot of Google noise to what’s most relevant).

Time-Sliced News Search – Takes a year and query you input and generates date-restricted searches for multiple news search engines at once – including Google News, Google Books (Books, Newspapers, and Magazines are searched separately), Newspapers.com, and Chronicling America.

Twitter Receipts – Not all of us are on Twitter, but if you are, you’re going to like this one! Twitter Receipts has you enter a Twitter handle and a date, then queries our friend, The Wayback Machine, for the closest snapshot of the Twitter handle to that date.

Happy sleuthing!

Photo Credit: Denish C under Creative Commons license