29 August 2015

THE UNITED STATES CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS - FILM REVIEW - GENEALOGY RESEARCHING CCC's

DID YOUR GRANDFATHER or another MALE RELATIVE JOIN THE CCC's as a teenager in the 1930's (GREAT DEPRESSION ERA leading into World War II era) in order to learn skills and most importantly SEND MONEY HOME? 

Not just anyone could sign up.  This was a RELIEF PROGRAM (which I sure wish was still going on today) that existed from 1933 to 1942 in the US.  It was part of President Roosevelt's "New Deal" and a man had to be 18-23 years old (eventually they took men 17-28 years old) who were unmarried an unemployed.


image from PBS
  

 


A ROBERT STONE FILM

*****




CCC LEGAGY. ORG - RESEARCH  includes links to forms to send away to the right National Archives (Saint Louis) and information on CAMP LISTS.

So OK, the difficult has been (hopefully in the past) that men who joined the CCC's were sent to various camps, not necessarily close to home.  The goal was to SEND MONEY HOME and LEARN SKILLS.  The 1940 census might be of help to some of you, but don't count on it.  I've personally been unable to use a database to search that census for CCC members I'm looking for.  One of the reasons is that a typical participant stayed in the program for 6 months and could reenlist a total of 4 times for a 2 year stint.  This wasn't a branch of the military, but there was a sort of boot camp at first to see if a person was physically fit before they started doing a lot of hard physical labor, like building walls or planting trees to reforest a burned out area.  A person could be transferred around to where there were work projects.  Many men from poor families dropped out of high school to join or first did the CCC's and then enlisted in the military.  There were separate camps for veterans and Native Americans.

Today when you go to many parks, you will find stone walls and stairways that are still in use that CCC workers built.  (Such is the case in some of the Santa Monica Mountains here in Southern California.)


24 August 2015

PRINCESSES BEHAVING BADLY - ANCESTRY WORSHIP - GENEALOGY BOOK REVIEW



The Princesses in this book are not all from Europe and they include the schemers, the insane, the plain unlucky.  It's enough to make you stop trying to prove a royal connection in your family history.

Really, you may count yourself lucky to have come from less inbred people!

Here's a link to Linda Rodriquez McRobbie's own review of her book! HUFF POST - 11 of the BADLY BEHAVING PRINCESSES - with Pics!

Small Quote!  "I took a look at the not-so-Disney lives of 30 princesses, and found a whole world of women whom history had mostly forgotten, vilified, or written off. These are women who took the crown and ran with it--though not always to particularly nice places. They lied, murdered, used sex, or dressed like a man to hold on to power, and weren't afraid to get a little blood on their hands. They're also women who were imprisoned, victims of circumstances entirely beyond their control, or who were forced to make difficult decisions that history still punishes them for. Some were mean, petty, and vain; some drank too much, or gave their affection rather more freely than their contemporaries thought appropriate. Some just wanted to have a good time, no matter how much that unsettled everyone else. And others, of course, were just bizarre and possibly mentally ill- a limited gene pool can be just as corrupting as absolute power. But at the end of the day, they're all real--and isn't that somehow more satisfying than the glittery, pink-and-purple fantasy princess?..."

at this site you can read a bit about Njinga, the Murderous Warrior Princess, Charlotte of Prussia, the Sex Party Princess, Princess Louise of Belgium, the “Insane” Princess, and Märtha Louise, the Princess Who Talks to Angels.

*****

I picked this book up at the library because there are chapters devoted to Elizabeth Bathory (discussed on a recent post below) as well as one of my favorites, Princess TNT (Thun und Taxis), also known as the Punk Princess turned astute business woman.

OK, I confess that I read around European royalty a lot, have a fascination with tiny Monaco and the next generation there, and have no current claims to be related to any Kings or Queens, maybe just German and Hungarian, petty nobles... and as a citizen of the United States of America, my ancestors gave up on all that long ago.

I so enjoyed this book that it's one for my bookshelf meaning I'm going to buy it!


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05 August 2015

A SHIVER UP THE SPINE WHEN LOOKING AT A PHOTOGRAPH? ANCESTRAL MEMORY?

Have you ever had the experience of looking at a photograph and suddenly feeling a shiver go up your spine?  I have.  That shiver feels like a confirmation of truth somehow, and it certainly makes you pay attention to the photography.  What is it about a scene from another country or time and place that you recognize deeply?

I was researching one of my personal ancestral lines which, according to the marriage record I was looking at, went back to a German town in what was Hungary but is now Romania.  This was one of the towns which, while over hundreds of years was no doubt Hungarian, but the residents kept to German customs too, speaking both languages, building houses, wearing clothes, and keeping to customs that were more German.

So I wanted to see some pictures of this town and towns like it.

I went to a famous research institute, the Getty, and before I got there I ordered many books to be bought upstairs for me prior to my arrival.  Not known for genealogy, but for art, the Getty Research Institute still houses MANY books that can be very useful to researchers of family history and genealogy researchers as well as those learning about other cultures and societies for which the expression of creativity is one factor.  In this pile I found two books that were especially informative and interesting and that applied to my personal research.  These books were not available through my large city library or anywhere else I checked.

In one of them there were black and white pictures of this German town. I turned the page to  a simple street scene, and got the shiver up the spine.  None of the other pictures in the book did that to me.  I looked again.  There was something about that curve in the road.

It made me wonder if I was having a moment of ANCESTRAL MEMORY.

The theory of Ancestral Memory is that in our DNA/genes we have memories of things our ancestors have experienced.  In this case we are talking about a GGG.

This is different that Reincarnation Theories that suggest that we might incarnate in the same family, as a descendent of someone we were on earth years prior. 

With Ancestral Memory, all you have is GENETICS, your own body carrying information.  The theory has nothing to do with any spiritual belief.

Let's say that you were born and raised in the United States and identify as All American and really believe in justice and equality for everyone but you still find yourself fearing a certain ethnic group.  (I realize that admitting to such a thing may even be considered not politically correct, yet I hear people say they have such fears!)

My friend Marilyn, who only recently realized that she has German heritage in her ancestry on one side of the family, has since hearing of Germans in childhood, has always felt a little sick to her stomach at the mention of them.  She has never self identified as German and has self identified herself as Polish.  She had of course heard about World War II and the Holocaust, but she had no reason to believe that her own family heritage was any part of that.  Marilyn hated it when she learned she was genetically partly German, but she also felt there was no logic to it.  After some in depth research and interviewing family members and then reading around the history of the places they came from,  Marilyn learned that one of her ancestors had been taken from his house by German soldiers and had never been heard from again.  He was not Jewish.  This happened before World War II. When she got some photos of the town where this happened, she began to have a strong sense of having been there, of recognition.  Marilyn does not believe in reincarnation but she now believes that her fear is the fear of this ancestor.


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Ancestry Worship - Genealogy