Craig at GeneaBlogie poses an interesting question: Why do we so often slip into a hillbilly accent when pretending to talk like old folks—even if our folks grew up in Manhattan or Saskatchewan? The answer he provides cites Looney Tunes, so it must be correct.
Liverpool is celebrating its 800th birthday by seeking out the family with the deepest roots in the city.
Anyone living in Merseyside who can prove their family tree goes back further in Liverpool than anyone else will be invited, with three of their relatives, to take pride of place in a once-in-a-century procession through the city on 'Liverpool 800 Day' on August 28th.What happens if two or twenty or two-hundred people can trace their lineage back to the same Liverpool resident? Will there be room in Aunt Mimi's kitchen?
Those who trace the earliest Liverpool-born ancestor will also earn the title of 'Liverpool's Oldest Family', as well as a fantastic heritage weekend in the city in October, which includes:
- 2 nights for family of four at Hard Days Night Hotel. The world's first Beatle's concept hotel. (Opens October 2007)
- VIP tour of the prestigious Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Liverpool. (October 19 - Jan 13 2008)
- Free annual family membership - two adults and two children - to the National Trust.
- VIP tour of National Trust-owned Beatles childhood homes and related attractions.
- VIP tour of St George's Hall - which re-opens on April 23 2007 after a £23m restoration.
- Free, special-edition copy of 'Liverpool 800: Culture, Character and History', by University of Liverpool Press. [Link]
Against her better judgment, Dana Huff tagged me for a Thinking Blogger Award. After much consideration, I've decided to pass the honor along to five non-genealogical blogs that get my cerebral juices flowing.
OF COURSE, shaking hands with a chimney sweep will not bring you luck. That is a myth perpetuated by Disney.
BUT NOT LONG AGO I consulted a contemporary, non-top-hatted chimney sweep who, EVEN THOUGH HE LOOKS LIKE A NORMAL, UN-COCKNEY HUMAN, told me he is constantly accosted by old women looking to touch him and thus ward off their horrible fates.
SPECIFICALLY, he said, women of Polish extraction want to pinch him as that is the custom for squeezing out good luck from a chimney sweep in that country.
I LAMENTED this unfortunate occupational hazard, and then I briefly throttled him. We all have our traditions.
That is all.
Sandy Berger is best known as Bill Clinton's National Security Advisor, but he considers his new job just as vital. As founder and president of DocuDirect, Berger says he can deliver documents at half the price of other companies.
Neil Howe and William Strauss have made a cottage industry of identifying the distinguishable generations in English and American history. According to them, my Revolutionary War ancestor Moses Dunham was of the Republican Generation, while his son Lemuel was of the Compromise Generation: "Compliantly coming of age, [he] offered a new erudition, expertise, and romantic sensibility to [his] heroic elders' 'Age of Improvement.'" And I thought he was just a poor farmer!
The official website has their current list of generations, from the Arthurian to the Millennial. See Wikipedia for even more generational labels.
107-year-old Olive Riley is a great-great-grandmother and a blogger. Here's how her first post at The Life of Riley, dated Feb. 16, began:
Good Morning everyone. My name is Olive Riley. I live in Australia near Sydney. I was born in Broken Hill on Oct. 20th 1899. Broken Hill is a mining town, far away in the centre of Australia. My Friend, Mike, has arranged this blog for me. He is doing the typing and I am telling the stories. He thinks it’s a good idea to tell what’s going on. He already made a film about me a few years back and people liked that, so they might like this blog too, he says. We’ll see. [Link, via OhmyNews]
The U. S. Postal Service is floating the idea of issuing "forever stamps"—first-class postage that can be purchased now and used at any time in the future.
"You say nothing lasts forever, but this stamp will," [Postal Service spokesman Mark] Saunders said of the forever concept, which some foreign postal administrations, including Britain's and France's, have embraced.I would hope that any great-great-great grandchildren I leave behind would be smart enough to sell those antique stamps on eBay instead of sticking them on envelopes.
"When your great-great-great grandchildren go through your junk drawer at home, when they are excavating your house, they'll say, 'What are these?' -- and they'll still be able to use them." [Link]
Chicago Sun-Times business reporter Francine Knowles got some help tracing her roots from Megan—who apparently has given up sleep as a condition of her new position at Ancestry.com. Francine was helped also by the long memory of her father, who remembered the former slave enumerated with his family in 1930.
Mama Creasy was apparently psychic. According to my dad, she lived to be either 115 or 116 years old, and on her last day on this earth, she told everyone earlier in the day she was going to die at noon. My dad recalled, "When daddy came into the house after farming out in the field that morning, she said, 'I told you I was going to die at 12 o'clock.' She said, 'You all have been good to me, and I want to thank you.' She took her last breath as a bell outside tolled noon." [Link]
Chris Adams thought he was marrying Gemma Mortell on Valentine's Day. But upon checking the marriage certificate after their honeymoon, he discovered that he had actually married his best man.
Gemma had mistakenly signed her name in the 'witness' space - and best man Paul Hickleston had put his signature where the bride's should have been.
Chef Chris said: "I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw what we'd done. I've known my best man for over 20 years and he's a great guy - but I don't want him as my missus." [Link]
William Dawes also took a midnight ride on April 18, 1775, but his name didn't rhyme with "Listen my children and you shall hear." Now it appears that the attention given the long-neglected patriot in recent years has been paid in the wrong ZIP code.
It looks like even the few dedicated tourists who've bothered to pay their respects to Dawes have been solemnly standing on the wrong side of town.
Though plaques and published guides place Dawes's remains alongside his relatives in the King's Chapel Burying Ground downtown, veteran tour guide Al Maze recently discovered evidence suggesting that Dawes's final resting place is in fact in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain. [Link]
Bao Wenguang's mother found a century-old document that helped establish his descent from Genghis Khan.
The document was found in 2002 when his mother was tidying up the courtyard in the family's ancestral home, but Bao is only now making the find publicly known.
The "Bao family tree", is 6 meters long, 1.45 meters wide and together with other documents [cover] a period of more than 200 years. [Link]
A couple of notable genealogists have discovered that the family histories of two presidential aspirants—Strom Thurmond and Al Sharpton—intersected in the antebellum South.
According to the Daily News, the genealogists found documents establishing that Sharpton's great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave owned by Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was Strom Thurmond's great-great-grandfather. Coleman Sharpton was later freed.When first told of the connection, a nephew of Senator Thurmond exclaimed, "That's a bunch of baloney," while a niece graciously allowed that "it is wonderful that [Sharpton] was able to become what he is in spite of what his forefather was."
The newspaper said the lead researcher was Megan Smolenyak, the chief family historian for Ancestry.com and an author of several published books on genealogy. Another researcher on the project was Tony Burroughs, who teaches genealogy at Chicago State University. [Link]
Those caskets found in Israel contained the bones of their occupants, and mitochondrial DNA was reportedly extracted from the boxes labeled "Yeshua" and "Mariamne" (better known as Jesus and Mary Magdalene). Critics argue that the names on the ossuaries were common among Jews of the era, to which Lost Tomb of Jesus director Simcha Jacobovici responds, Consider the odds.
"There are really only two possibilities," says director Jacobovici. "Either this cluster of names represents the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family. Or some other family, with this very same constellation of names, existed at precisely the same time in history in Jerusalem."
To calculate the odds, Mr. Jacobovici took the data to University of Toronto mathematician Dr. Andrey Feuerverger. Factoring in the commonality of these names in first-Century Israel, Dr. Feuerverger puts the odds of this tomb not belonging to Jesus and his family at one in 600. [Link]
Now comes news that the bones of Sitting Bull his descendants want to move may actually be in Canada.
Jerome First, a 70-year-old Montana Sioux and the great-grandson of Sitting Bull's close friend, Chief Medicine Bear, claims the latest uproar over the bones is irrelevant because Sitting Bull was secretly buried in the Turtle Mountains of southern Manitoba.
The Turtle Mountains straddle the border between southwestern Manitoba and North Dakota.
"They faked his grave," First told CanWest News Service on Friday, "because Sitting Bull had visions that there would be a fight over his body." [Link]
On an episode of the BBC Wales family history show Coming Home, Petula Clark learns that her birth was "premature."
Jenny Newman tells the performer her parents were married in May 1932, only six months before she was born.
"That is nice, I like the idea of that - I was their love child!" says the singer. [Link]
Among the weighty issues being debated in the press are whether Barack Obama is black enough to be president, and whether Mitt Romney's great-grandfather is fit to be the great-grandfather of a president.
Romney's great-grandfather, Miles Park Romney, married his fifth wife in 1897. That was more than six years after Mormon leaders banned polygamy and more than three decades after a federal law barred the practice.
Romney's great-grandmother, Hannah Hood Hill, was the daughter of polygamists. She wrote vividly in her autobiography about how she "used to walk the floor and shed tears of sorrow" over her own husband's multiple marriages. [Link]
Viktor Chumakov's mission in life is to save the seventh letter of the Russian alphabet from extinction and, by doing so, preserve the traditional spellings of some 2,500 Russian surnames (including Khrushchyov and Gorbachyov).
The letter "ё" (pronounced "yo") first appeared in 1795, but fell on hard times when printers began dropping the dots to save a few kopeks. The letter was also hanging out in the wrong neighborhoods.
Part of the reason for the demise of the letter 'ё' could be because of its unsavory associations with Russian 'mat' -- the colorful language within a language that constitutes Russian swear words. Very few words begin with 'ё' in Russian, and most of the ones that do would make a sailor blush.Those two little dots do make a difference. Without them, a Russian bride might be given a "solityor" (tapeworm) instead of a "soliter" (diamond).
But Chumakov says he is not deterred by the letter's reputation -- he has written three books on the history of the 'ё' and a dictionary of words that contain the letter. To date, there are 12,500 ordinary words and 2,500 surnames. And he didn't include a single curse. [Link]
Salvador Dali left no descendants, but forensic scientist Michael Rieders found the artist's DNA on a pair of nasal feeding tubes used during a 1984 hospitalization. They had been preserved by "two of Dali's closest friends."
"I'm not 100% sure why [they kept them]," said Dr Rieders, a toxicologist and lab director at NMS Labs in Willow Grove, Philadelphia, "but I now had an artefact that I was reasonably sure would contain some of Dali's DNA."And why would a scientist want Dali's DNA? To test it for signs of genius (and/or madness), and to authenticate works attributed to him.
"We now have the art world very interested in using this Dali DNA reference as a way of looking to see if some of the other objects and artwork out there could perhaps be Dali's."
One piece in particular, a small watercolour called The Snail and the Angel, has a brown stain on it that is supposedly Dali's semen. The authenticity of that painting is not in doubt, but Dr Rieders thinks it would be a good place to start to try out the DNA fingerprint. [Link]
A team of filmmakers that includes Titanic director James Cameron will present evidence on Monday that Jesus' burial site has been found.
The story starts in 1980 in Jerusalem’s Talpiyot neighborhood, with the discovery of a 2,000 year old cave containing ten coffins. Six of the ten coffins were carved with inscriptions reading the names: Jesua son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Matthew, Jofa (Joseph, identified as Jesus’ brother), Judah son of Jesua (Jesus’ son - the filmmakers claim).
Although the cave was discovered nearly 30 years ago and the casket inscriptions decoded ten years ago, the filmmakers are the first to establish that the cave was in fact the burial site of Jesus and his family. [Link]A film about the discovery will be broadcast on the international Discovery Channel, Britain's Channel 4, Canada’s Vision and Israel's Channel 8. I hope the film is better than the website.
The U.S. Census Bureau has spent years figuring out how to phrase the six questions they'll ask everyone in 2010.
Question No. 3 asks gender, with the admonition to "Mark ONE box" -- male or female. Whether the Census Bureau included that instruction or left it out in the 2005 field test, the results were the same. Either way, 0.05% of those asked -- that would mean 150,000 in a population of 300 million -- still checked both. But the instruction made the question longer and more visible, and fewer people skipped it.
Question No. 4 asks age -- and for a computer double-check, date of birth -- because so many people seem to get it wrong. Adding instructions to "report babies as age 0" when they're less than a year old, offends some people, census research suggests. But in the 2005 trial it improved the response rate among people who otherwise couldn't decide how to answer for a six-month old. [Link (reg. req.)]
Lee Hardin Woody has discovered that she is a second cousin, nine times removed of George Washington. Her father isn't surprised.
He said, "Some people think the picture we have of my mother" -- Mary Gray Riley -- "kind of looks like Washington." [Link]
A Dr Pepper promotion that involved finding a hidden coin worth $10,000 in Boston's 347-year-old Granary Burying Ground has been called off after city officials locked the gates to prevent contestants from entering.
Cadbury Schweppes PLC, which makes Dr Pepper, canceled the Boston portion of the 23-city coin hunt promotion yesterday after acknowledging it had stashed the coin, in a leather pouch, amid the remains of Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and other historic figures. The coin is still missing.... except hide a valuable prize inside and invite people to trample the graves of Boston's ancient dead—all to sell a few more cases of a beverage I wouldn't drink on a dare.
"The coin is inside the park," Cadbury Schweppes spokesman Greg Artkop told the Globe. "We agree with the Park Department's decision to lock the gates. We wouldn't do anything to desecrate this cemetery." [Link]
A story made the rounds in Scotland that some dim-witted couple named their baby "Pocahontas" after seeing the 1995 Disney movie. Joel Conn of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research has established that this is a myth.
Using the Freedom of Information Act, he confirmed that no-one named Pocahontas has been recorded by the General Register Office for Scotland since at least 1974. The Office for National Statistics also revealed no record of anyone with the Native American name in England or Wales since at least 1944.Conn's next job: disproving the existence of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research.
Mr Conn, a 31-year-old Glasgow-based solicitor, said: "I am not ashamed to say that I believed it was possible at first. [Link]
Lula Joughin Dovi has written a lengthy piece for the St. Petersburg Times about the search for her half-sister Roberta—born in 1924, the child of her father's second wife. The mystery of Roberta's fate was cleared up a few years ago by an English cousin and fellow genealogist, Philip Allen.
"Hello, Lula, I just had to tell you about this," Philip wrote in his e-mail. "Did you know that your half-sister married the younger son of an English duke?"
In an idle moment at work he had been on the Internet looking for Joughins in California, when he came across the name. He saw that Lord Edward Eugene Fernando Montagu, second son of the ninth duke of Manchester, had married Roberta Herold Joughin (his fifth wife) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on Sept. 28, 1953.
Roberta had died in 1964 in Los Angeles. [Link]
Ancestry.co.uk has begun adding World War I British Army service and pension records, starting with 100,000 records for A and B surnames. If your ancestor's name began with "zed," you might have to wait until 2008.
They reveal intriguing personal details, such as how Pte Thomas Beedham, a 34-year-old fitter from Leicester, was "admonished" and fined four days pay for absenting himself from a draft on Aug 28, 1916. The forms also show how Pte John William Ballinger, of 1bn Manchester Regiment, had a "distinctive" scar on his right leg and how one soldier was almost 64 when he fought. [Link]To the question "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?" the British Army evidently answered, "So long as you fit the uniform."
Sherrod Bryant was a typical wealthy slave owner in Tennessee prior to the Civil War, but he differed from his slave-holding neighbors in one respect: he was black.
Today, the notion of a black man owning black slaves seems contradictory — Bryant himself was a free black — and perhaps even hypocritical. According to Bryant's descendants, however, their ancestor, who was never a slave, was simply following the normal pattern of life for a rich landowner in the Upper South.
"I think at some point some of the members (of the family) might not have looked upon it very favorably, but the more we discuss it, the more we suddenly realize that to gain wealth during that time, if you had a lot of property, you had to have slaves to help you cultivate it," said Carl Bryant, a fourth-generation descendant of Sherrod. [Link]
Sitting Bull's descendants want his remains removed from South Dakota to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana because they object to the "improvements" planned for his burial place.
The catalyst for the great-grandchildren's decision apparently was a proposal by the nonprofit Sitting Bull Monument Foundation, which recently purchased the grave site from a private owner. According to its Web site, the foundation's plans include preservation and protection of the grave site and development of an educational and cultural center and museum. It would also include riverfront recreational development, an amphitheater, snack bar, restaurant and gift shop. [Link]
A young man from South Africa named Surprise Ndlovu was surprised to learn that his birth certificate says he is female. This means that he can't get his national identification documents and proceed with his studies—at least not without undergoing several rounds of expensive surgery.
"My life is doomed," he said on Wednesday, holding back tears.
"I wanted to become a social worker, but now it seems I can't even become a truck driver.
"How can I get a driver's licence without an ID book?" [Link]
Textile expert Loreen Finkelstein has matched up a 2-foot-by-2 1/2-foot fabric panel found at Mount Vernon with a gaping hole in the tent George Washington used as his headquarters at Valley Forge. The missing fragment will eventually be sewed back in place.
The tent was taken down for conservation in October 2003 and brought to Finkelstein's laboratory in Williamsburg, Va. During that process, Finkelstein was also called upon to evaluate some of Washington's clothing at his Mount Vernon estate.
It was while doing that work that Finkelstein became aware of tent fragments at Mount Vernon. One remnant in particular looked like it could be the missing piece, Finkelstein said Wednesday.
She went back to Williamsburg and made a template of the hole, which she brought back to Mount Vernon in April 2005 for comparison. It matched almost perfectly, she said, noting that further confirmation came from analysis of the thread count and stitching technique. [Link]
Dr. Cecil Roth discusses in an interview evidence that Christopher Columbus was a Spaniard and a Jew:
His interviewer, Rabbi William Berkowitz, adds this excellent bit of apocrypha:There was an old gentleman in New York who noticed that on the right-hand side on the top of some of Columbus’s letters there was a little squiggle, and he remembered that his father used to write Baruch HaShem at the top, right-hand corner of all his letters. He tried to read these marks as B’ezras HaSham and thus to show that Columbus tried to reveal his Judaism by putting two Hebrew letters at the top of every letter he wrote. He wasted quite a considerable fortune on this rather pathetic and ludicrous attempt.
Whenever the name of Columbus comes up, I recall the story of the Jewish immigrant who appeared before the examiner and was exceedingly nervous. After he gave his name and address the next question was about when he had arrived in America. Instead of saying 1941, he said 1491. The examiner turned to him and said, “Why didn’t you wait another year; you could have come with Columbus!” [Link]
