Best. Prank. Ever.

From the Chester (Pa.) Daily Times of Oct. 5, 1877:

A great many people in St. Louis have seen something of the peculiar performances of a young mulatto named Albert Rhodes, who follows the river for a regular living, but whose chief delight is in exhibiting his skill as a whistler and ventriloquist before crowds wherever he can find them.

At Vicksburg, about two months ago, he attended a funeral. The burial service was recited, the coffin lowered into the grave, and the boards adjusted. As the first clod of earth fell on the boards there came a low moan as if from the coffin. The sounds at first were very indistinct, but in a minute they became loud and frantic, as if the corpse had come to life and was struggling to free itself from the habiliments of the grave. Most of the bystanders fled in dismay, the women and children shrieking. Those who remained hastily raised the coffin from the grave, and, without waiting to unscrew the lid, pried it open with an axe. It was at once discovered that it was not possible that there could be a spark of life in the corpse. Decomposition had set in. The next day it leaked out that Rhodes was the offender.

On the Track of 'Trick or Treat'

A genealogist thinks he's found the first two appearances of the phrase "Trick or treat" in print.

In his research for his Wikipedia entry on trick-or-treat, writer Steven Dhuey traced the term to the Nov. 2, 1934, editorial [in The Helena (Montana) Independent] and also to a story that ran Nov. 1, 1934, in the (Portland) Oregon Journal. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia, that is written and edited by volunteers.

"It's interesting to me that that corner of the country had the two earliest references to the term," Dhuey said from his home in Toledo, Ohio. "It makes you think, was there a certain ethnic group that dominated the area?"

Dhuey, also a law student, professional genealogist and author of more than 300 Wikipedia entries, said that it's notable to consider the number of Scottish immigrants in Oregon and Montana at the time. According to 1930s Census data, these two states had healthy concentrations of Scottish immigrants. [Link]

Mabel Knew Ma Bell As Well

Mabel Grosvenor, a granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell, died Monday at 101. She may have been the last person alive with personal recollections of the famous telephone inventor, who died when she was 17.

In the early 1920s, as Mr. Bell neared the end of his life, Ms. Grosvenor travelled with her grandparents to Scotland, where Mr. Bell searched for long-lost ancestors.

"He called it a farewell visit," Ms. Grosvenor said during an interview in 1994.

"He didn’t really get interested in genealogy until his father died and one reason he went back was to try and look for more information. We went to parish offices to look through records and visited cemeteries. He found several cousins he didn’t know existed." [Link]

We're Not in Salem Anymore

From The Indiana (Pa.) Democrat of Oct. 30, 1879:

Several girls were recently brought before a justice in Scranton, Pa., on a charge of stoning a peaceable old lady. Their defence was that she was a witch, and they believed it to be their duty to stone her to death.

From The Marion (Ohio) Daily Star of Mar. 6, 1882:

A Wisconsin farmer has been put under bonds to keep the peace on account of his attempts to mutilate an old lady whom he believes to be a witch. He avers in defense that she had bewitched his cattle and has repeatedly entered his domicile through the chimney, the keyhole and other inconvenient and inappropriate apertures, contrary to his wish and to his great terror and distress.

From The Madison County (Ill.) Courier of Apr. 19, 1866:

The following witty yet suggestive anecdote is related of Chief Justice Holt, before whom an old woman was once brought accused of witchcraft. The evidence against her was that she had been seen to ride through the air on a broomstick.

"Well, my good woman," said the humane judge to the demented old creature, "did you ride through the air, as the witnesses say?"

"Yes, sir," replied the accused, supposing that what everybody said must be true.

"And I know of no law against it," said the judge, who immediately discharged the prisoner.

Better Safe Than Sorry

From the Sedalia (Mo.) Daily Democrat of Jan. 23, 1875:

Nicholas Borolajovak, a Servian nobleman, died in Paris recently under peculiar circumstances. He had been forced to leave his own country by an ugly legend which pronounced his family vampires. It was said that for three generations the eldest son in his family had invariably returned from the grave to drink the blood of its living members. Strange to say, Prince Nicholas himself believed the legend, and when he was first taken ill, five days before his death, he asked his host of the Hotel de France et de Roumanie to have his heart taken from his body as soon as life was extinct. This, he believed, would prevent him from leaving his tomb. He was a man of brilliant powers and high culture, and but for this mania regarding vampires would have proved an ornament to any rank. He was buried in Paris.

Genealogy Blog Search Update

Well over 200 family history blogs are now included in my new Genealogy Blog Search. Thanks to all who've sent suggestions. I'd like to try answering a question that several bloggers have asked.

Why isn't my blog showing up?
Genealogy Blog Search takes its results from Google's main index. But there are some webpages in the main index that don't show up in Custom Search Engine results. These are the ones labeled "Supplemental Result."

What is a Supplemental Result? Here's Google's definition:

A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it's pulled from our supplemental index. We're able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index.

In other words, these are results that don't quite measure up to Google's standards, but still might satisfy the needs of someone searching the web.

As an example, look at this perfectly fine blog about a Sherwood family in Kentucky. It's been up and running since August 2005—plenty of time to be indexed by Google. If we check to see how many pages from the site are found in Google's index, the answer is 19. All but two of these pages are labeled "Supplemental Result," which means that only two pages show up in Genealogy Blog Search results.

Until Google allows Custom Search Engines to search the Supplemental Results, many blog posts will be left out of Genealogy Blog Search.

How can I improve indexing of my blog?
(If you're an absolute newbie to the search engine optimization (SEO) game, read Lorelle VanFossen's How Search Engines See, Search, and Visit Your Website. Don't worry, she's one of us.)

Google won't like your blog if it's unpopular, disorganized, or repetitive. Here are three tips to earn Google's affection:

• Get people to link to your blog and your posts. Google gives greater weight to pages with more inbound links. Links to the internal pages of your site encourage search engines to come looking for content buried deep. Write something worth linking to, and let people know about it. Dropping relevant comments on the blogs of others is a great way to invite new readers. Adding your blog's URL to Cyndi's List and the Encyclopedia of Genealogy, or submitting an especially good post to the Carnival of Genealogy might also earn you some link love.
• Leave a path to your posts. From the front page of your blog, make sure you're able to reach any archived post in just two or (at most) three clicks. Also, consider submitting your RSS or Atom feed as a sitemap to Google's Webmaster Tools to ensure that new posts get crawled (you can also submit a second sitemap that includes your archived posts).
• Make each page unique. Google hates duplicate content, so you might want to block the indexing of your archive or category pages with "noindex,follow" robots META tags. Each page on a site should also have a unique META description. If you use Blogger, you can accomplish this by doing some tinkering in your template. WordPress users might have to use a plugin.

In short, if your blog isn't showing up at Genealogy Blog Search, this doesn't mean that I haven't included it. Check how well your site is indexed by Google before assuming that I've left it out, and take steps if your blog is languishing in supplemental purgatory.

The Last Living Neanderthals?

Bryan Sykes's Saxons, Vikings, and Celts—which I reviewed a few days ago—has an amusing aside about two brothers in Wales known as the "Tregaron Neanderthals." Sykes was interviewed last month in Wales on Sunday about the pair.

The twin bachelors lived behind the ruins of a Cistercian monastery at nearby Strata Florida, where they were apparently visited every year by school pupils eager to learn about human evolution.

Prof Sykes told WoS: "By the time I heard the story, they were dead, but it was always said that these bachelors were neanderthals. It is just possible. Children would be taken to see them in geography or history lessons.

"I have looked at 10,000 people in the UK and I have never seen a piece of neanderthal DNA, but I have not given up hope." [Link]

Parting Shots

More than six million tributes are submitted to Legacy.com each year by people wanting to share memories of a deceased friend or relative. But not every submission is accepted.

In 2006, more than 300,000 were deemed "inappropriate" and removed before "going live" in an obituary.

Unacceptable entries range from airing family "dirty laundry" to accusations of misbehavior on the part of the deceased. "She was an awful boss," "He had a mistress," or "He owed me money" are common themes, as are rehashing old grudges and feuds, says Hayes Ferguson, Legacy.com's chief operating officer. [Link]

They Did Not Approve

From The Petersburg (Va.) Index of June 13, 1868:

Col. John M. Chivington, in St. Joseph, Nebraska, recently married the widow of his own son, which led to the publication of the following card from her parents:

A Card to the Public.—We, the undersigned, take this method to inform the public that the criminal act of John M. Chivington, in marrying our daughter, Mrs. Sarah A. Chivington, the widow of Thomas M. Chivington, was unknown to us, and a thing we very much regret. Had the facts been made known to us of the intentions some measures would have been taken to prevent the consummation of so vile an outrage, even if violent measures were necessary. Hoping that this may be a sufficient explanation, we remain, &c.

John B. Lull.
Almira Lull.

The Lulls' opposition to the marriage probably had less to do with the father-son relationship of their daughter's two husbands than with Col. Chivington's 1864 escapade in Colorado.

San Francisco's Multilayered History

Andrew Galvan is curator of Mission Dolores, site of one of San Francisco's oldest cemeteries (backdrop, by the way, for a scene in Hitchcock's classic Vertigo).

When Mission Dolores cemetery opened in 1777, Ohlones were among the first to be buried there. By 1898, when the last grave was dug, some of the city's notable characters, including a mayor, volunteer firefighters and even vigilantes were buried -- on top of the Ohlones. That's what makes Galvan's latest project a bit ironic. Galvan [...] is finishing up the construction of an Ohlone-style tule house atop unmarked graves. The tent will replace a grotto (made out of tombstones) that stood until the mid-1990s.

"We're basically building a memorial to Indians on top of white people who in turn are on top of Indians," Galvan says. "That might be a first." [Link]

Oldest WWI Vets Meet, Bloodshed Minimal

Britain and Germany's oldest World War I veterans met for the first time on Saturday. Henry Allingham is the oldest man in the UK at 110, and Robert Meier holds the title in Germany at 109.

Ninety years ago, air mechanic Henry flew over the Somme crouched in the back of a biplane and dropped bombs on to the battlefield where infantryman Robert dived for cover. But today the warmth of their greeting leaves many in the room in tears.

Henry's trembling hand reaches out to touch Robert's cheek and, as his eyes fill up, he says: "It's a joy to meet you, old chap."

Beaming Robert clutches Henry's shoulder and says: "Wunderbar!".

As the wine and beer flow, Robert gees up teetotal Henry: "Where were you at the Somme? I was waiting to meet you."

Henry laughs: "It was a long time ago, but I didn't shoot you!" [Link]

Genealogists Unemployed in New Zealand

Nathan Fien's decision to play for the New Zealand rugby team instead of his native Australian team has sparked a controversy. The international constitution requires that a foreign player's grandparents be from the country he is representing, and some in Australia are demanding proof that Fien's grandmother really was a Kiwi. An Australian newspaper went so far as to call 20 relatives and friends of Fien to ask if they had ever heard of the grandmother in question, Irene Lilian Maude-Lett.

They gave almost the same answer. Not one of them had heard of Fien's grandmother Irene or of his supposed New Zealand heritage. Others tried desperately to pour cold water on the controversial subject. When we contacted Fien's uncle Ron, he abruptly hung up after saying: "That's a question that only Nathan should answer."

Repeated calls to Fien's father, Arthur, and sister Kara went unanswered. Mysteriously, Cathy Martin, a Fien family friend said: "I don't know the Fiens." She then hung up. [Link]

For its part, the New Zealand Rugby League argues that grandmothers are notoriously forgettable.

NZRL chairman Selwyn Bennett believes that sort of investigation is nonsense and that most people could ring 20 friends and relatives who would not know who their grandmother was.

He says the implied accusations are dangerous and people have to be taken at their word as they do not employ genealogists, and it would be a sad day if they did. [Link]

The Greenbrier Ghost Contest

Juliana Smith and Ancestry.com are offering a prize to the first person who can identify the illegitimate child of The Greenbrier Ghost, Elva Zona Heaster.

In a nutshell, Elva gave birth to a son out of wedlock in 1895, married a guy named Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shue in 1896, had her neck broken by Shue in January of 1897, and haunted her mother until he was arrested. But what became of her child?

Whoever identifies Elva's offspring first gets an Ancestry.com World Deluxe subscription (or upgrade or extension). How hard could it be to chase down the child of a ghost?

Ancestors in the Arctic Attic

Ancestors in the Attic—hosted by the enthusiastic and sometimes spastic Jeff Douglas—is airing only in Canada, but you can catch some webisodes here. The second of these, Lost Gravestones, tells of a search requested by blogger Kate Johnson. There is also a Web Log where genealogist Paul McGrath gives a behind-the-scenes account of the research that underpins each episode.

If an American cable channel picks this up, it could be our best Canadian import since Alex Trebek jumped the fence.

Epitaphic Wit

Spike Milligan was not allowed to have "I told you I was ill" inscribed on his headstone, but the diocese that governs the St. Thomas Church in Winchelsea, East Sussex, did allow him the Gaelic equivalent: "Duirt me leat go raibh me breoite."

This and other apocryphal-sounding inscriptions today from Gordie Little:

"Grim death took me without any warning. I was well at night and dead in the morning."

"Here lies Ezekial Aikle aged 102. The good die young."

"Beneath this grassy mound now rests one Edgar Oscar Earl who to another hunter looked exactly like a squirrel."

I have a friend who tells pretty good ghost stories himself. His name is John Ford. I wonder if he knows there is a gravestone in England with the following inscription: "Here lieth Mary, the wife of John Ford. We hope her soul is gone to the Lord. But if for Hell she changed this life, she had better be there than be John Ford's wife." [Link]

Would the Cisco Kid Tell a Lie?

Duncan Renaldo was an actor best known for his portrayal of the Cisco Kid on film and television in the '40s and '50s. For a time in the 1930s, he was better known as "the man without a country."

His career was going great guns in Hollywood until in 1930 he applied for a passport to Africa [to film the movie Trader Horn]. He was an orphan, whose assorted foster parents had taken him all over the world, but they all assured him he really had been born in Camden, N. J. He listed that town as being his birthplace and that was a serious mistake.

While he was appearing before the cameras in Africa, the immigration bureau was looking up his record. It became increasingly confusing.

"The officials eventually found birth certificates showing I had been born in four different countries," he recalled. "I had served in the U.S. army during the World war and I was willing to be listed as anything the officials wanted to call me, but I went to trial, anyway, on charges of being an alien illegally in this country." [The Zanesville (Ohio) Signal, Sept. 22, 1939]

This first-hand account leaves out one juicy detail: Renaldo and co-star Edwina Booth were rumored to have had an affair while filming Trader Horn. Renaldo's wife found out and reported his illegal entry into the United States during their divorce proceedings. He may indeed have been an orphan, but he was also a stoker aboard a steamship who came ashore in 1921 and never left.

Renaldo's claim to have "served in the U.S. army during the World war" also bears scrutiny, given his reported 1904 birth date. A June 1936 AP article said that he served for three years with "the famous 77th Regiment of New York" after jumping ship, which—if he served at all—would be more plausible. [Update: According to court records, Renaldo actually arrived in 1917, which would have given him time to enlist in America as an extremely young doughboy.]

Having been found guilty of perjury, Renaldo was sent to McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary near Seattle for 18 months. He was released and pardoned by President Roosevelt in January of 1936 thanks to the appeals of his friends in Hollywood, but he still faced deportation. The court had ruled that he was a Romanian citizen named "Vasile Dumitree Coghieanas." Romania had no record of his birth, and refused to give him a passport. Again his friends intervened, and in the spring of 1936 the United States agreed to grant him a passport, but only if he traveled to Tijuana and re-entered the country "on the Rumanian quota." Renaldo became a U.S. citizen in 1941, exclaiming, "I finally made it, thank God!" He died in 1980, and was buried in Calvary Cemetery in Santa Barbara, California.

100% English, But 24% Middle Eastern

The DNA test results for the daughter of former UK PM Margaret Thatcher were something of a surprise. They showed that Carol Thatcher's ancestry is 76% North European and 24% Middle Eastern.

The family’s blood ties to the Middle East will be revealed next month in a Channel 4 programme, 100% English, which explores the DNA of eight people who considered themselves completely Anglo-Saxon.

Carol Thatcher, in Australia filming a new I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!, the reality TV show that she won last year, said: “Do I know if any of my great-grandfathers had any associations or came from the Middle East? I haven’t got a clue. I will do what research I can. I am now very curious.

“My brother did once compete in a motor rally across the Sahara desert and rather famously got lost, so I think he will be astonished to know he should have done better.” [Link]

Thatcher was crowned "Queen of the Jungle" on the aforementioned reality series after eating "jungle bugs and kangaroo testicles to help sustain her fellow celebrities." Her mother did the same thing during a 1979 campaign appearance to prove herself qualified for the Prime Minister's job.

Irish Coats of Arms: Pricey But Worthless?

Irish coats of arms have been granted to presidents John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, but the Garter King of Arms in London says they're not worth the vellum they're printed on.

Guy Power, a civil servant with Nasa in California, wrote to the College of Arms in London asking it to reregister a grant of arms made by the Irish chief herald in 1981. Peter Gwynn-Jones, the Garter, replied that this posed a considerable difficulty.

In a letter to Power he said an order made in 1943 by the Irish government “did not include any explicit measure empowering the new chief herald to grant armorial bearings”. He noted that several recent judgments also indicated that powers the Irish state thought it had “have no such origin”. [Link]

Ancestors Abroad Are Coming Aboard

Ancestorsonboard.com, which I wrote about in April and September, is bringing the first of 30 million UK passenger records online in the next few weeks. If you want a preview, buy some units at 1837online.com and then go here to search "a sample of the records from 1890 to 1899." Click on the image below to see what info you can expect to glean from this subset of records (later records may be expected to include more details).

Bloodsucking Yankees

Belief in vampires was once prevalent in some parts of New England, where people went to great and disgusting lengths to ward them off.

Following the death of a family member from consumption (i.e., tuberculosis), other family members began to show the signs of tuberculosis infection. According to the New England folk belief, the "wasting away" of these family members was attributed to the recently deceased consumptive, who returned from the dead as a vampire to drain the life from the surviving relatives. The apotropaic remedy used to kill the vampire was to exhume the body of the supposed vampire and, if the body was un-decomposed, remove and burn the blood-filled heart or the entire body.

A corpse was exhumed in Griswold, Connecticut, in the early 1990s that showed evidence of both tuberculosis and postmortem tampering.

Upon opening the grave, the skull and femora were found in a "skull and crossbones" orientation on top of the ribs and vertebrae, which were also found in disarray. On the coffin lid, an arrangement of tacks spelled the initials "JB-55", presumably the initials and age at death of this individual. [Link]

FoodfortheDead.com has more details on the Griswold discovery (including photographs of the gravesite and an artist's reconstruction of what "JB" might have looked like) and on vampire incidents elsewhere in New England. (Flash player is required; click on a town's name to view its gruesome history.)

Old MacDonald Had a Cow ... and a Granddaughter

From the Decatur (Ill.) Review of Dec. 15, 1918:

"The value of vital statistics might be cited from the following, vouched for by Dr. Hurty of the Indiana State Board of Health.

"A farmer in Indiana left his valuable farm in trust to his unthrifty son, to go to his granddaughter on her twenty-first birthday. When she believed she was 21 and claimed her inheritance, her father disputed her age, saying she was only 19. The family Bible was consulted, but the leaf with the record was gone. The court was in a quandry. At last a neighbor remembered that a valuable cow belonging to the grandfather had given birth to a calf on the day the girl was born, and he could swear to the coincidence; perhaps the grandfather had recorded the date of the birth of the calf. His farm books showed that he had done so, and the date of the birth of the girl was thus established. This story has a cheerful ending; in too many instances hardship and loss have been suffered because of a similar lack of indisputable birth records."

We Live, We Die, We Decay

Donald and Betty Timberlake recently met their great-great-grandfather for the first time. He was buried in an iron coffin in 1863 and disinterred because of encroaching development on the grounds of his former Virginia plantation. He's now being inspected at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History.

First, Shelley Foote, a specialist in 19th century clothing, examined the corpse.

"He was buried in a suit," she said. "The cutaway coat was typical of a man's daytime wear. It's a little unusual that the lapels have velvet facings. He must have been wearing a cotton shirt because cotton disintegrates quickly and there's no sign of it."

Pathologist Larry Cartmell took samples of hair, fingernails and body tissue, placing them in plastic bags for lab analysis.

"From the hair and fingernails, we can determine what medicines he was taking and how much he used tobacco and alcohol, Cartmell said. "We can do tests to determine how much meat he ate. We will x-ray the teeth to look at that abscess. We will put everything together and attempt to come up with a cause of death."

Asked her thoughts about viewing the remains of her great, great grandfather, Betty Timberlake shrugged. "It's all part of life. We live, we die, we decay." [Link]

Book Review: Saxons, Vikings, and Celts

Bryan Sykes's forthcoming Saxons, Vikings, and Celts (UK title: Blood of the Isles) is a genetic guidebook to Britain and Ireland that answers such age-old questions as "How are the Irish and Scots related?" and "What the hell is a 'Pict'?"

Sykes—a pioneering geneticist and founder of Oxford Ancestors—moves easily between myth, history, and science, as he must to tell a story this convoluted. The early history of the Isles—mostly a series of invasions, recoveries from invasion, and preparations for invasion—was poorly documented, if documented at all. Over the centuries this history was reshaped to suit current political needs, with historical events mythologized and new origin myths historicized. From this dubious mess Sykes seeks out "crumbs of credible historical fact," some of which foreshadow his own discoveries.

The arithmophobic layman has nothing to fear from this book. Sykes only once reduces his findings to a list of numbers, for which he immediately apologizes, saying, "This is no way to treat our ancestors." (For those who don't care how our ancestors are treated, the nasty details may be found on the companion website.) His explanations of how DNA may be used to discover genetic origins and migration patterns are made easier by reference to the now-famous Seven Daughters of Eve. If you don't grasp how Y-chromosome and mtDNA testing works when you pick the book up, you will when you put it down.

In the second half of Saxons, Sykes describes his travels to Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England to gather DNA, each travelogue followed by an overview of that region's test results. The two genetic histories of each region are discussed: the one told by the Y-chromosome (passed from father to son), and the other told by mitochondrial DNA (passed from mother to child). The strongest conclusions are drawn from Scottish results; those drawn from English results are the most vague, owing to the common genetic origins of the later invading forces (Saxon, Dane, Viking, and Norman).

The historical details that Sykes teases out of the genes of the living are remarkable. Vikings in Iceland really did import their wives from Ireland and Scotland. The Romans left scarcely a genetic trace in England. The Picts were nothing more than mislabeled Celts. And, as ancient myths suggested, a large number of Irish Celts came from Spain.

Sykes describes his work as "genetic archaeology." What a perfect term to evoke the history buried in our cells, waiting to be brought to light.

Official Irish Dirt

Two enterprising men are selling "Official Irish Dirt" to Irish-Americans looking to soil their caskets with a lump of the Old Country.

Pat Burke, 27, and Alan Jenkins, 65, have just shipped their first $1 million load of 'official' Irish soil to New York – at $15 per 12-ounce (340-gram) bag – and confidently expect it will be followed by many more.

'The demand has been absolutely phenomenal,' Burke, an agricultural scientist from County Tipperary, said on Friday.

Burke said the idea for the business – whose Web site www.officialirishdirt.com will go live shortly – came about after Jenkins attended an Irish association meeting in Florida.

'He found that all that these second, third and fourth generation Irish wanted was a drop of the old sod – a true piece of old Ireland – to place on their caskets,' he said. [Link]

23 Hours and Two Generations Apart

Terry Lamb of Culver, Indiana, had a child and a great-grandchild born a day apart this week.

Lamb, 59, a truck driver, is Terrian's daddy. Wife, Kim, gave birth to Terrian Tuesday at Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center in South Bend.

On Wednesday, Lamb's granddaughter, Danyiel Shireman, formerly of Bremen and now of Argos, gave birth to Lamb's seventh great-grandchild, Addison, at Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center in Plymouth.

So, that makes Terrian about 23 hours older than Addison. It also means Terrian is Shireman's aunt and Addison's great-aunt.

"It was kind of weird at first," Shireman said Thursday at the Plymouth hospital as she handed little Addison over for kisses to new daddy Evan Byers. "It seems pretty natural now, because we were pregnant together." [Link]

Genealogical Mudslinging

From the Steubenville (Ohio) Daily Herald of Sept. 8, 1875, copied from the Norristown (Pa.) Herald.

A man in a neighboring county who wished to write a history of his family, was unable to obtain the necessary material; but when he got nominated for Congress the opposition papers furnished him a complete history of the same for six generations back, and didn't charge him a cent. But he says he doesn't believe his great-great-great-grandmother was burned for being a witch, and that his great-great-grandfather was hanged for stealing a sheep, as stated in the papers.

A Kerfuffle in Hollsopple

Ed Holsopple is lobbying to change the name of a Pennsylvania town from "Hollsopple" to "Holsopple." The controversy stems from an old disagreement within the Holtzapfel family as to how to spell their name. They settled upon "Holsopple" in 1880, but the town wound up with an extra letter.

Residents in this leafy community unsurprisingly are mixed on the name change.

“If they’re going to change it, I’m for it,” said Mike Burkett. “I believe that’s the way it was originally spelled.”

Others sided with two L's.

“I’m so used to writing it this way. I’d like to keep it,” Chad Varner said.

“It doesn’t matter, but I’m used to spelling it with two L's,” added Wanda Rager before entering the post office.

One woman remained indifferent to the spelling dilemma.

“It doesn’t matter to me as long as I get my mail,” said Mabel Fox. [Link]

Ancestry.com Offers Three for Free

Thanks to Steve Danko for pointing out that the article on today's Good Morning America genealogy segment includes a link good for three free days of Ancestry.com access. Excuse me while I try to cram a hefty sackful of research through a 72-hour window.

A Vital Source of Novel Ideas

Writing novels and short stories is Steve Whisnant's night job. He gets some of his ideas from his day job, as field representative for the Vital Records Division of the Arkansas Department of Health.

“The death certificate is one of the last documents of the living, so we want to make sure it’s filed properly,” he says. “We do queries if something on a death certificate looks wrong.”

In his story “Hospicetality,” a deputy sheriff suspects something odd about an old man’s death, but his only evidence — the body — has been cremated. In “Certificate of Death,” as the author tells it, “somebody is looking at death certificates, and they come across their own death.” The idea might be scarier if he didn’t describe it so good-naturedly. “I enjoy my day job,” Whisnant says. [Link]