AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH IS A GREAT TIME TO START YOUR AFRICAN-AMERICAN GENEALOGY RESEARCH - SOME THINGS TO LOOK FOR

You don't have to be African American to do African American history or genealogy research. Many White Americans go back a few generations and are surprised by the fact that they have an ancestor of a different race, or that someone related to them once owned slaves. Likewise, DNA projects are revealing that most African-Americans by now have some White DNA.

Besides following census and city directories and military records, here are some other documents to look for:

In 1863 when Black soldiers were recruited to serve the Union side of the Civil War, their services was documented. Look for COMPILED RECORDS FOR THE U.S. COLORED TROOPS which can take you to PENSIONS. These will include a soldier's rank, company, and regiment in the U.S.C Infantry, his pension number, and a death date in some cases. The service records can be extensive starting with enlistment places and dates.

Southerners who lost property in the Civil War sometimes made a claim for reimbursement. Look in THE SOUTHERN CLAIMS COMMISSION files. There are sometimes testimonials of great detail. This would include property owned by free persons who were once slaves.

THE FREEDMAN BANK RECORDS can also be helpful. Because freed slaves were allowed to pick their own name (first and last), and sometimes picked one and changed it again, or siblings took different surnames, and many of the records are not easily linked to a census or other record because many slaves moved, this database may not be useful to the majority. However, once in a while a researcher finds gold. Start by running the more unusual names in your family.

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A PRINCESS FOUND by SARAH CULBERSON and TRACY TRIVAS : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW

A PRINCESS FOUND by SARAH CULBERSON and TRACY TRIVAS 

SARAH CULBERSON's search for her birth parents took her to Sierra Leone, Africa and the devastation of that country due to war. So many children were left without limbs. As a result of meeting her birth father and being accepted by the whole village she started a Foundation to support the school.

Sarah wanted to meet her birth parents, though she had a happy childhood with her parents and siblings in Morgantown, West Virginia, soon after her 18th birthday. Luckily her parents and some locals had enough information to get her started and over time she came to understand their history and to accept herself as is.

She resolved the mystery of her birth mother, a white woman first, and then her African father. He was a student at the university and her mother could not cope with raising her on her own.

None of this took extensive genealogy research because people knew people and were willing to divulge information but it did take personal courage and openness.

The book is copyright the authors and published by Saint Martin's Press, and should be of interest to anyone who is facing a similar search.

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THE RED QUEEN by MATT RIDLEY : BOOK EXCERPT : THE SIX CIVILIZATIONS OF EARLY HISTORY and FERTILITY

THE RED QUEEN by MATT RIDLEY  

Page 198-199

"The six independent "civilizations" of early history - Babylon, Egypt, India, China, Aztec Mexico, and Inca Peru - were remarkable less for their civility than for their concentration of power. They were all ruled by men, one man at a time, whose power was arbitrary and absolute....WITHOUT EXCEPTION, the cast accumulation of power was always translated into prodigious sexual productivity.... The Babylon King Hammurabi had thousands of slave "wives" at his command. The Egyptian Pharaoh Akenaten procured 317 concubines and "droves" of consorts. The Aztec ruler Montezuma enjoyed 4,000 concubines. The Indian emperor Udayama preserved 16,000 consorts in apartments ringed with fire and guarded by eunuchs. The Chinese emperor Fei-ti had ten thousand women in his harem. The Inca Atahualpa... kept virgins on tap throughout the kingdom."

The women were kept to breed the emperor's children...

"Measures to enhance the fertility of the harem were common... Wet nurses, who allowed women to resume ovulation buy cutting short their breast-feeding periods, date from at least the code of Hammurabi in the eighteenth century B.C... The Tang dynasty emperors of China kept careful records of dates of menstruation and conception in the harem so as to be sure to copulate only with the most fertile concubines... These harems could hardly have been more carefully designed as breeding machines, dedicated to the spread of emperors genes.

C Matt Ridley 1993 HarperCollins was the publisher

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CROATIAN NEANDERTHALS DNA and US : WE HAVE SOME OF THEIR DNA STILL IN US!

Has your boyfriend been acting a bit like a NEANDERTHAL lately? Maybe that's because some of us are still carrying some NEANDERTHAL DNA in us!

There are so many articles on the Net about this breaking news, but I linked to Time-Science here... cool picture of someone you dated right there!

"Scientists discovered that 1% to 4% of the latter three DNA samples is shared with Neanderthals — proof that Neanderthals and early modern humans interbred. The absence of Neanderthal DNA in the genomes of the two present-day Africans indicates that interbreeding occurred after some root population of early modern humans left Africa but before the species evolved into distinct groups in Europe and Asia. "

GOT THAT? INTERBRED!

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE MARCH 2010 HUMAN FAMILY EARILIEST ANCESTORS

Hominid fossils are rare indeed, but new finds and new scientific theories are suggesting that maybe that shared ancestry with the chimpanzee (96 % shared DNA) isn't about what chimps look like NOW! Fossil "Ardi" is suggesting by none evidence that she both walked upright and spent a lot of time hanging in trees... LINK NOW to the article, above!

CAN YOU BE A CREATIONIST and an EVOLUTIONIST ? - YES !

ABOUT "COLOR"

Over time I've met a lot of people who want to find out if rumors that they are (their genetics that is) makes them part African-American, part Native American, part Jewish, or part Gypsy otherwise "not really White" or a person of "Color."

The reason they don't know for sure is that either their family members did not know, or they knew and kept it secret because these ethnic or racial aspects of their genetics were or are considered undesirable, even shameful. Now they look in the mirror and wonder.

I'm not trying to judge people who feel that they must keep it a secret that they are "part" of a group they can't relate to or maybe never even met. It may have been that by not telling the whole truth to children, the parents felt they were saving their children the hardships of prejudice which they themselves had experienced. It's no longer OK to call people names based on their ethnicity or race but many of us have memories of being around people who did call names, and thought nothing of it. Some people just thought that ethnic stereotypes were true.

For this reason, prejudice, ignorance, or covering truth, the reportage on census and other documents, birth, marriage, and death certificates may not be accurate.

I remember researching a family that came from North Carolina right near a Cherokee reservation and reading census page by page (which people who use databases tend not to bother with but which was standard operating procedure using microfilm) which really gave a sense of the neighborhood where a lot of families clearly stated off reservation that they were Cherokee, while others had children in categories of both White and Black rather that - it was later proven - just say they were Cherokee or of Native American descent. In some cases the genetic link to a Person of Color went back a couple generations. By this point the entire family was Baptist and socialized White. And various members of this family tree had stayed behind when the Trail of Tears happened while others helped round up the Indians to march.

It all reminds me of a Norman Rockwell painting of the red haired boy who has Cowboys and Indians in his heritage.

HIS BIOLOGICAL FATHER IS CHARLIE MANSON

There were a lot of news articles on line to pick from but this one from THE SUN, has great photos showing the likeness that confirms that Charlie Manson, the infamous head of the Manson Family and Los Angeles DJ Matthew Roberts are father and son.

I'm posting this, not for the lurid aspect of this breaking news, but because adopted as children, many people feel it is important to find their real parents. It varies from state to state and the laws and contracts at the time of adoption, but through adoption registry sites, at the age of 18 a child can post seeking a parent.

This has to be one of the more rewarding areas of genealogical research for me, but at this point this is my advice to Matthew Roberts. Even when all paperwork and looks are persuasive, get a DNA test that confirms the match!

SOUTH AFRICAN's HAVE THE GREATEST GENETIC MIX - AFRICANS THE MOST DIVERSE IN A RACE

Yahoo news brings us this article... click click click!