The following states are now activated for searching by name! There are still a number of states that desperately need volunteers. Do one page!
VERMONT ALASKA IDAHO NEVADA WYOMING ARIZONA UTAH COLORADO KANSAS DELAWARE VIRGINIA FLORIDA MAINE NEW HAMPSHIRE
WOW!
21 May 2012
MOVING MIDWAY : DVD : A STORY ABOUT THE MIDWAY PLANTATION OF RALEIGH NORTH CAROLINA
Like any old house in which six generations of the same family have lived there are ghosts and there is the memory of the elders of the family and of living in the house.
Our notions of the Big Plantation House come from Hollywood and Gone With The Wind though.
Midway isn't all that much bigger than a modern suburban house, most plantations were not all that big, and few had as many slaves as depicted in the movies.
Trouble is 600 homes are being built in a new subdivision next to the house and property held by this family over 200 years. Thousands of vehicles including noisy big rigs go past every day on the street out front. It's time to move the house.
The physical aspect of moving a house to 40 acres of land that was once part of the original land grant is interesting in itself, but along with the controversy comes another descendant of the family, an African American professor from Yankee territory, and the discovery of 100 African American cousins though one of the cooks who was enslaved there and the owner of the house, are alive and some few also have memories of the family and stories of life there. The Professor of history is Robert Hinton. Together they explore the personal and historical mythologies.
I recommend this film which came out in 2008.
13 May 2012
THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF EVE : BRYAN SYKES : EXCERPT : HOW TO BE A CLAN MOTHER?
Page 197-198-199
"There are a few qualifications you needed to be a clan mother. The first is that you needed to have daughters. ... A woman who had only sons could not be a clan mother because her children would never pass on the mitochondrial DNA they received from her, so that is the first rule. The second is that you had to have at least two daughters. ... The clan mother is the most recent maternal ancestor that all the members of a clan have n common. Imagine a clan with ten million living members and imagine that we knew perfectly from the registry of births, marriages, and deaths exactly how they are all related. As we went back in time, generation by generation, we would see the maternal lines slowly joining up. The lines in brothers and sisters would converge,. after just one generation, in their mother. After two generations, cousins would converge on their maternal grandmother, their mother's mother. Three generations ago it would be the second cousins whose lines coalesced in their maternal great -grandmothers. And so on. At each generation there would be fewer and fewer people in the clan who had maternal descendants living today. Eventually, hundreds or even thousands of generations ago, there would be only two women in the clan who could claim to have maternal descendants living in the twenty-first century. Further back still, the maternal lines of these two women would converge on a single woman - the true clan mother. And to be in that position she must have had not one but two daughters. ...
A clan mother did not have to be the only woman around at the time and she certainly wouldn't have been. But she is the only one who is connected through this unbroken maternal thread right through to the present day... lines died out..."
C 2001 Bryan Sykes Norton Publishers
I'm saving up to have my DNA done. I want to do the test that takes you back only 3 generations, just to see if a rumor about my heritage is true. The DNA test that takes you all the way back to the CLAN MOTHER is a different test. I sure hope that someday I can do that one too... DNA testing is going down in price (slowly) while the databases expand and increase our potential knowledge rapidly.
"There are a few qualifications you needed to be a clan mother. The first is that you needed to have daughters. ... A woman who had only sons could not be a clan mother because her children would never pass on the mitochondrial DNA they received from her, so that is the first rule. The second is that you had to have at least two daughters. ... The clan mother is the most recent maternal ancestor that all the members of a clan have n common. Imagine a clan with ten million living members and imagine that we knew perfectly from the registry of births, marriages, and deaths exactly how they are all related. As we went back in time, generation by generation, we would see the maternal lines slowly joining up. The lines in brothers and sisters would converge,. after just one generation, in their mother. After two generations, cousins would converge on their maternal grandmother, their mother's mother. Three generations ago it would be the second cousins whose lines coalesced in their maternal great -grandmothers. And so on. At each generation there would be fewer and fewer people in the clan who had maternal descendants living today. Eventually, hundreds or even thousands of generations ago, there would be only two women in the clan who could claim to have maternal descendants living in the twenty-first century. Further back still, the maternal lines of these two women would converge on a single woman - the true clan mother. And to be in that position she must have had not one but two daughters. ...
A clan mother did not have to be the only woman around at the time and she certainly wouldn't have been. But she is the only one who is connected through this unbroken maternal thread right through to the present day... lines died out..."
C 2001 Bryan Sykes Norton Publishers
I'm saving up to have my DNA done. I want to do the test that takes you back only 3 generations, just to see if a rumor about my heritage is true. The DNA test that takes you all the way back to the CLAN MOTHER is a different test. I sure hope that someday I can do that one too... DNA testing is going down in price (slowly) while the databases expand and increase our potential knowledge rapidly.
11 May 2012
FAMILYSEARCH 1940 CENSUS PROJECT SPEEDING ALONG - A FEW STATES ARE ALREADY SEARCHABLE!
Dear Genealogy Maniacs,
If you, like me, took part in crashing the National Archives site the day the 1940 census opened to the public, you will be EXTREMELY EXCITED TO KNOW that several states are already searchable by name, that several more have been completely indexed but are not yet searchable, and that the deadlines are being beaten... volunteers from genealogy societies, members of various stakes of LDS, and individuals, have all contributed.
I personally met a man who has indexed over 60,000 names and a woman who has indexed over 20,000.
DELAWARE, OREGON, COLORADO, KANSAS, and VIRGINIA are searchable.
I also saw a demonstration of the application that is used and it sure is making it easier to read and submit - the wonders of technology! Now I know that indexing is not for everyone, but I want to encourage you to do a batch or two (one batch is one page of an ED), especially in the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey and New York, which need help! (You do not need to be from the state to participate!)
To use the FAMILY SEARCH 1940 site, go to the FamilySearch site, and click on the top left 1940 picture. You'll then see a map of the USA color coded to show progress. (Or you can take the easy way there and click on the title of this post!)
05 May 2012
SAXONS VIKINGS AND CELTS by BRYAN SYKES
Were the first inhabitants of Britain a race of Giants under Albion, a son of the sea-god Poseidon, who had a band of fifty women, who had all killed their husbands?
What is myth and legend but doesn't hold up when science pays its part in recreating the human story? Bryan Sykes's SAXONS, VIKINGS, and CELTS, is the result of DNA testing over 10,000 people living in the British Isles. Here you will learn that:
The blue tattooed Picts were Celtic too.
The LeTene style, now most strongly associated with Celtic Art, began not on the Atlantic ocean costs but in view of the Alps, and when there was a mass migration it was not by land but by sea, following the Mediterranean, around the Iberian peninsula and north.
That the evidence for the Viking's plundering is there, but also there is the evidence that the Vikings brought along some Viking women to procreate with.
The Genghis Khan effect is that 8 percent of men in Mongolia have inherited this gene because Genghis style was to kill all the men and inseminate all the women. But the term is also used when scientists find that a man or clan or group of men dominated the women. (Some fertile men never got to mate.)
That a few surnames show that all men in the clan show a DNA signature; you could find this signature elsewhere and know without a doubt what CLAN. Are you a Macdonald, McDougall, or Macalister? 200,000 men carry these genes, originated with a man named Somerled, a Celtic hero who helped drive away the Vikings.
Your blood type is associated with your DNA. The cause is very slight changes in the DNA of the blood group itself.
As with the Seven Daughters of Eve, the book he published years earlier, as a writer Sykes will warm you up before he delivers the information, so that the myths and legends are understood first. This book was published by Norton in 2006... so it also stands as the state of the art book on DNA use for genealogy at that time.
Now I want to ask Sykes if there is any way he can get DNA from the lone woman who was found in Los Angeles' LaBrea Tar Pits, where thousands of animal bones have been found!
What is myth and legend but doesn't hold up when science pays its part in recreating the human story? Bryan Sykes's SAXONS, VIKINGS, and CELTS, is the result of DNA testing over 10,000 people living in the British Isles. Here you will learn that:
The blue tattooed Picts were Celtic too.
The LeTene style, now most strongly associated with Celtic Art, began not on the Atlantic ocean costs but in view of the Alps, and when there was a mass migration it was not by land but by sea, following the Mediterranean, around the Iberian peninsula and north.
That the evidence for the Viking's plundering is there, but also there is the evidence that the Vikings brought along some Viking women to procreate with.
The Genghis Khan effect is that 8 percent of men in Mongolia have inherited this gene because Genghis style was to kill all the men and inseminate all the women. But the term is also used when scientists find that a man or clan or group of men dominated the women. (Some fertile men never got to mate.)
That a few surnames show that all men in the clan show a DNA signature; you could find this signature elsewhere and know without a doubt what CLAN. Are you a Macdonald, McDougall, or Macalister? 200,000 men carry these genes, originated with a man named Somerled, a Celtic hero who helped drive away the Vikings.
Your blood type is associated with your DNA. The cause is very slight changes in the DNA of the blood group itself.
As with the Seven Daughters of Eve, the book he published years earlier, as a writer Sykes will warm you up before he delivers the information, so that the myths and legends are understood first. This book was published by Norton in 2006... so it also stands as the state of the art book on DNA use for genealogy at that time.
Now I want to ask Sykes if there is any way he can get DNA from the lone woman who was found in Los Angeles' LaBrea Tar Pits, where thousands of animal bones have been found!
02 May 2012
SHOAH FOUNDATION TO INCLUDE GENOCIDE TESTIMONIALS OF ARMENIANS AND OTHERS
The SHOAH FOUNDATION will now be taking testimonials of those who experienced the Armenian Genocide. Funny, I just posted about the genocide and saw an article in the local news about it. The link to SHOAH foundation is at the title - click!
By the way, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY at NORTHRIDGE has just had an "ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AWARENESS WEEK." That's terrific!
By the way, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY at NORTHRIDGE has just had an "ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AWARENESS WEEK." That's terrific!
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