29 April 2013

ARE YOU A CHIMERA? (Do You Have Eyes That Don't Match?)

The other day, my brown eyed dog and I were taking a walk when we encountered a person with a white pit bull that had one blue and one brown eye?  His name was Bruce.  I said his name should be Bowie, as in David Bowie, who has one blue and one brownish eye. Got to talking and I remembered a set of twins in my neighborhood growing up, a girl and a boy, who were not identical but looked a lot alike.  The girl had one blue eye and one hazel.  I'm leading up to this:

A CHIMERA is a person who has TWO SETS OF DNA! 

Here is more about it from SANTA CRUZ HUB PAGES! People-with-Double-DNA-An-Overview-of-Chimeras 

When I heard about this, I thought about all those TV shows in which DNA tests are administered to reveal truth or lies about the paternity of the children.  Almost always the mother is absolutely right about who the father of her child is, even if he's in denial.  In the cases where there was not a match, I wonder if another test has to be made!

26 April 2013

GOLD BEDECKED SKELETON AN ANCIENT BEAKER PEOPLE QUEEN ?

YAHOO : GOLD BEDECKED SKELETON MAY BE ANCIENT QUEEN  link here (includes a picture of a reconstruction of what she may have looked like at the burial.)  The woman was found in England between Windsor Castle and another town.

EXCERPT:

"The woman's bones have been degraded by acid in the soil, making radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis impossible. Nonetheless, excavators believe she was at least 35 years old when she died sometime between 2500 B.C. and 2200 B.C., around the era Stonehenge was constructed.


The woman was adorned with a necklace that had tube-shaped beads fashioned out of sheet gold and black disks of lignite, a dark, coal-like material similar to jet. Though her clothing long ago disintegrated, amber buttons and fasteners were scattered across the woman's body in a row, hinting at how she may have been dressed..."

23 April 2013

INBREEDING OF EARLY HUMANS : FOSSIL SKULL EVIDENCE

LIVESCIENCE : Tanya Lewis article : Inbreeding Common in Early Humans, Deformed Skull Suggests  link here!

EXCERPT: "The evidence comes from fragments of an approximately 100,000-year-old human skull unearthed at a site called Xujiayao, located in the Nihewan Basin of northern China. The skull's owner appears to have had a now-rare congenital deformity that probably arose through inbreeding, researchers report today (March 18) in the journal PLOS ONE..."




20 April 2013

NEADERTHALS DID NOT RAISE PINKY WHEN SIPPING TEA!

Most of us have used the term NEANDERTHAL to describe an uncouth person, a man or woman with no manners, or sometimes a person who seems to be a "throw back" in their attitudes about the opposite sex...


DISCOVERY : NEATHDERTHALS LACKED SOCIAL SKILLS

18 April 2013

OZZY OSBOURNE'S GOT NEADERTHAL DNA? : ARE WE SURPRISED? (OZZY HAS A GREAT SENSE OF HUMOR!)

OK, I read Ozzy's book a few months ago, ust because, and he was very very funny!  Even though I never watched the Osbourne family's reality TV show and am not a fan of Heavy Metal music or people who behead bats on stage with their own mouths, so, so I still found his book truly funny.  In it he wondered why he was still alive.  Guess some scientists were wondering too!

Here's the article from Scientific American  Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neandertal Lineage By Katherine Harmon

EXCERPT: "For a long time we thought that Neandertals didn't have any descendents today, but it turns out that Asians and Europeans have some evidence of Neandertal lineage—like a drop in the bucket. We found a little segment on Ozzy's chromosome 10 that very likely traces back to a Neandertal forebearer.


Ozzy, of course, was tickled to hear this."

15 April 2013

PRESIDENT JOHN TYLER HAS TWO GRANDSONS STILL ALIVE!

DAILYMAIL : US PRESIDENT JOHN TYLER'S GRANDSONS ARE STILL ALIVE  link to full article and pictures and genealogy chart!


EXCERPT: ", the tenth president of the United States, was born in 1790. He grew up on a Virginia plantation, became a lawyer, and went on to the White House after the death of his predecessor, William Henry Harrison in 1841.

In the years leading up to his presidency, horse-drawn carriages were the mode du jour, Arkansas, Michigan, Maine, and Missouri became states, and across the sea, Napoleon Bonaparte was conquering Europe.

But it has been revealed that two of the president’s grandsons are still alive – and were born nearly 140 years after their grandfather was..."

I've been reading The Daily Mail quite a bit in the last couple months.  I swear they have some really good articles of American interest considering they are a publication originating in the United Kingdom!

10 April 2013

SPRING CLEANING : THERE IS ALWAYS MORE (GENEALOGY) TO DO

I've been SPRING CLEANING. 

That means that if you walk into my abode it looks like both a hurricane and an earthquake hit about the same time.  Really, you must bear with me. This is part of my process towards an actual photo-op of a very clean, tidy and organized household. 

How can anyone who has an entire room devoted to file boxes full of research really get more organized?  OK, I've been thinking of putting these all under a big table with a long tablecloth over it, for dust, and for the visual of neatness. It's true I don't go into these boxes all that often. Also I rarely have 12 people over for dinner.

Just as I was getting ahead on the project, life was complicated by the unprecedented offer to be part of a garage sale with several other neighbors.  I'd been thinking of having a sale, but obviously having it at the same time - a great big sale - with my neighbors taking responsibility for listing it on e-Bay and Facebook - was the best thing to do.

So, I spent several days pulling things out of storage and placing tags.  (I hate sales where nothing is marked.)  In the end I really didn't have that much to sell, and most of it was gently worn clothing, things that I hadn't donated to charity in the fall, and that I would donate if they didn't sell.

I found a wardrobe on wheels to take these freshly laundered and ironed items out to the front yard, but it was a VERY WINDY DAY, and the wind knocked the whole wardrobe down a few times, each time all the clothes flew to the ground on their hangers. So some of them got dirty despite all my efforts.

 Message: Shouldn't we be out sailing on such a glorious day?

Inevitably, the wind also knocked the signs my neighbors had spent hours making and then attaching to poles down the block to direct traffic, and my neighbor, who really did have a garage full of things to sell, got kind of upset when he checked and it turned out that 375 (three hundred and seventy five) other garage sales were taking place on the very same day as ours in a 20 mile radius. 

Brilliant minds think alike?

I made the best of it.  Tied the dog up to a tree in the shade, brought out sodas, and sold some poor man, who wanted shoes for his wife, five pairs for $25, even though I thought I should have gotten $50.

Meanwhile, back in the house, dishes piled up, so did laundry, so did books, movies, and binders meant to store this years research - lots of copies of 1940 census pages.  Even though I know I will get caught up, I had a momentary panic.

OK, it was one of those "you don't want to get caught like this" moments.  You know.  Just when things are this messy, that's when someone unexpected will show up and have to be allowed inside.  Like your high school sweetheart back in town for a visit?!

I hope you're laughing with me!

I'm starting to get a grip.  I just delivered four file boxes full of paperbacks and VHS films to a library that was very happy to have them.  Tonight, after dinner and the dog's walk, I think I'll rewatch an old movie and sort the laundry.

C Ancestry Worship Genealogy 2012  All Rights Reserved

03 April 2013

SAINT AUGUSTINE : OLDEST CITY IN THE USA : RECORDS BEING DIGITALIZED

SAINT AUGUSTINE FLORIDA HISTORICAL RECORDS BEING DIGITALIZED  link to full article via Saint Augustine's newspaper and Associated Press!

"These parish documents date back to 1594, and they record the births, deaths, marriages and baptisms of the people who lived in St. Augustine from that time through the mid-1700s. They're the earliest written documents from any region of the United States, according to J. Michael Francis, a history professor at the University of South Florida."