20 December 2012

VISIT SKIRBALL "CREATING THE UNITED STATES" EXHIBIT Through February 17, 2013

SKIRBALL HOME PAGE LINK   Creating the United States Exhibit amazing!  Expect low light and take some time. You'll be reading handwritten documents straight out of the history of the United States of America.  Can anyone help but compare their own handwriting to that of our Founding Fathers?  Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln.  (Also ask to see the small exhibit of Abraham Lincoln's artifacts in another gallery!)

excerpt:

"Adapted from an exhibition organized by the Library of Congress, where it was seen by some two million visitors in the library's historic setting, Creating the United States illuminates how the founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—were forged out of imagination and vision, as well as collaboration and compromise. While fulfilling the principles laid down by the founders has been a struggle throughout the centuries, the documents they painstakingly wrote are living instruments, essential to the evolution of America and its future.

"It is a very rare opportunity to see these humble, handwritten pages up close," wrote Robert Kirschner, Skirball Museum Director, in a recent SkirBlog post. "They are surprisingly small. The ink is faded. The penmanship itself is an artifact. Yet these documents are as eloquent and powerful as any ever written. When their faded ink was fresh, the world was ruled by kings..."

On view are original documents and autograph letters by George Washington, John Adams, John Hancock, and Thomas Jefferson; a first edition of Common Sense by Thomas Paine (1776); engravings by Paul Revere; a William J. Stone copy of the Declaration of Independence (1847); a Members Edition of the United States Constitution (1787); a facsimile of Jefferson's desk on which he drafted the Declaration of Independence; and an original copy of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (1863). Rarely has the history of American democracy been so vividly assembled for public exhibition in Southern California."

18 December 2012

DNA OF CHRISTMAS TREE TO BE REVEALED!

DNA OF CHRISTMAS TREE TO BE REVEALED : ASSOCIATED PRESS full article link here!

..."We're talking about the conifer, the umbrella term for cone-bearing trees like the spruce, fir, pine, cypress and cedar. Apart from their Yuletide popularity, they play big roles in the lumber industry and in healthy forest ecosystems... How big is a conifer genome? Consider the 80-foot Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center in New York. It's a Norway spruce, so its genome is six times bigger than that of anybody skating below it. Other conifer genomes are even larger..."

09 December 2012

WAS ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S FATHER A SPRINGSTEIN?

I'm hoping to get this book called Pandora's Box and read it, but until then here is a part of a controversial web site concerning the Paternity of Abraham Lincoln.

"Little has been published about the early life of Abraham Lincoln. However, during a search of some old property records and will in a small courthouse in central North Carolina, Alex Christopher the author of "Pandora's Box", found the will of one A.A. Springsin an old will book dated around 1840. Upon reading the will he was shocked and amazed at the secret it disclosed. But the fact is that wills, even though classified as public records the same as property and corporation records, are rarely combed through as he was doing. These documents can hold dark secrets hidden from public view and never uncovered because few research these old records.


Thus secrets are hidden in public view so that when accused of concealing the records, bureaucracy can reply "It was on public record in plan view for any and all to find."

The will of the late A.A. Springs lists his property and to whom the beneficiaries who included his children. Mr. Christopher and others were looking to find what railroads and banks this man might have owned and left to his son Leroy Springs. He didn't find anything like that, but he did find the prize of the century. On the bottom of page three of four pages was a paragraph where the father, A.A. Springs, left to his son an enormous amount of land in the state of Alabama which is now known as Huntsville, Alabama. At first Mr. Christopher and his colleagues could not believe what their eyes, because the name of his son was "ABRAHAM LINCOLN"!

This new information added to what they had already learned about the Springs, whose real name was Springstein, was one more twist to this already enigmatic family. This unexpected knowledge about Lincoln set their hearts on fire to see what further secrets this new lead might disclose. Because everything they had so far found in the railroad and banking saga had been really mind-opening, they figured this one would be the same. So they investigated the local archives and historical records on families and found a reference to one Abraham Lincoln in a published genealogy of a Carolina family by the name of McAdden. This genealogy was a limited edition of the type once found in the public libraries. The section on Lincoln resembled the following form of words."

LINK TO FULL ARTICLE BY ALEX CHRISTOPHER here

One of my questions is "how do you know there is only one Abraham Lincoln?"  I researched one town in Hungary where there were only four or five surnames for the entire population of the town, dozens of Maria Sabos...

I'm also hoping to check into the latest information on MELUNGEONS by  one of the authors and researchers relying on DNA to discover the origins of the Melungeons of Appalacia.



05 December 2012

THE HUNT FOR JOHN WILKES BOOTH : HISTORY CHANNEL : DVD REVIEW by ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY

Travel the escape route of President Abraham Lincoln's assasin John Wilkes Booth, as he eludes the biggest man hunt in American History to that point - April of 1865.
What I learned :

Booth may have been the shooter but he was part of a conspiracy that included several - some say many - others.

Booth heard so much anti- Lincoln talk among his confederate fellows prior to the end of the Civil War that he though he's be a hero and easily have a place to hide... So he and his conspirators thought that if they got into the South they would be safe.

David Herold was the co-conspirator who ran with Booth.

Several people - including a woman - were hung for their crime. A doctor who set Booth's broken leg was in prison for years before being granted a Presidential pardon years later.

02 December 2012

THE WHITE HOUSE PRESIDENTIAL BIOGRAPHY OF PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN

THE WHITE HOUSE PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA SITE on PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN

You can read the entire article by clicking on that link above, but here is the part that is important to genealogists...

..."The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a living and for learning. Five months before receiving his party's nomination for President, he sketched his life:


"I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, in my eighth year.... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all." ...

This article tells you the county and state Lincoln was born in and where his parents would also be found.  (By the way, I've heard that the actor Tom Hanks is related to the Nancy Hanks family.)



01 December 2012