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."

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..."

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.

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.)