Maps, World War I Heroes, Jewish Sperm Donors, and a Synagogue

I've recently come across some interesting opportunities to help with genealogy projects.  Maybe you can assist with one of them!

The New York Public Library is looking to crowdsourcing from "citizen cartographers" to identify details on digitized 19th-century New York City atlases.  The Building Inspector project allows you to use a desktop computer, tablet, or smartphone.  If you know New York City well, you'll be a valuable addition to the team.  The library plans to use the information to make the maps interactive and link them to other historical digitized documents.

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In conjunction with the UK's commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, the British newspaper The Sun has launched a campaign to create a photo database of the gravesites of Victoria Cross (VC) servicemen, and to bring attention to the sites that are most in need of restoration.  Some of the VC honorees date back to the Crimean War and the 1857 Indian Mutiny.  A list of 544 VC burials is included on the Web page.

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A memorial plaque for Second Lieutenant John Douglas Lightbody of the Royal Air Force, who died November 4, 1918, just days before the end of World War I, will be unveiled in Scheldewindeke, Belgium on November 10, 2014.  The organizers of this year's ceremony are looking for any living relatives of Lt. Lightbody, both to share information about him and possibly to attend in person.  An online article has more information about Lightbody and the search for relatives, including the e-mail address of a person to contact.

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Attention Jewish Men:  Did you donate sperm during the 1980's?  Seeking light-featured Jewish men who acted as anonymous sperm donors in the Los Angeles/UCLA area, between (but not limited to) 1981–1985.  Your offspring are seeking medical information.  Please contact 1980donor@gmail.com (for anonymous communication, create a new Gmail account).

Please feel free to share this with *everyone* you know, repost, attach to mailing lists, etc.  The more people who see this, the more likely it is that 1980donor@gmail.com will find the person he is searching for.

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I never post about fundraising efforts, but this is a little different.  A film raising money via crowdfunding is pledging half of the money to help restore the subject of the film.  The synagogue of Sabbioneta, Italy is a UNESCO World Heritage site but has suffered damage due to recent earthquakes.  The film, an independent comedy, is about a tombstone found in the town's Jewish cemetery.  Read more about the film and the synagogue here.

An Online Archival Collection of the New York Public Library

I often tell people that most material in archives will probably never be online because it is not cost effective.  It costs money to scan everything, prepare the files, and create and maintain a Web site.  This is why companies such as Ancestry.com charge subscriptions.  A lot of archival material is of limited appeal to the general public and it would be difficult to recoup operating costs.

That said, it's nice when a benefactor steps in to cover the costs of digitization and material can be made available freely.  This is what has happened with one of the New York Public Library's archival collections, the Thomas Addis Emmet Collection.  Thanks to a gift from the Polonsky Foundation, the collection is now available online in its entirety.

The Thomas Addis Emmet Collection contains more than 10,000 handwritten letters and documents from the time of America's founding and earlier, including a manuscript copy of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson's handwriting.  The dates of the documents range from 1483 to 1876, with the majority falling between 1700 and 1800.  Previously, researchers needed to visit the library in person to read the materials in the collection. Now this resource is freely available online to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

The main link above takes you to an overview of the collection.  Clicking on "Detailed description" takes you to the digitized collection itself, which is broken up into 28 topics.  Some examples of the topics in the collection are the Continental Congress of 1774, the Declaration of Independence, Signers to the Declaration of Independence, the Siege of Savannah 1779, Irving's Life of Washington, and Boundary Line Controversy.

At the end of the list is Miscellaneous Manuscripts.  I decided to look in there to see what was classified as miscellaneous.  I found a two-page letter dated September 18, 1757 to Mr. David Mendes Dacosta, a contractor for 100 bread wagons for Hessian troops.  His name sounds like a Sephardic Jewish one.  Maybe a descendant of his will find the collection and read the letter written to his ancestor.

Warning:  I have a pretty fast Internet connection, but I found the site painfully slow to load, both on the overview page and the pages with documents.  The image viewer appears to be designed to prevent downloading of images; when I tried to save an image, I would get one piece of it (similar to the Ellis Island Database).  I am using a Mac, however, so perhaps it works differently on a PC.

There does not appear to be an index or a finding aid for the collection.  (If I missed it, please tell me where it is!)  There is a link on the bottom of the page to "Find Archival Materials", but when I tried searching there for the Mendes Dacosta letter, it was not found.  So, as is common with many archival collections, it looks like you will need to browse and see what's there.