One of the great ways to learn American (or other) history is to read FICTION that is well researched and inspired. I've been hearing great things about LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON and so I've just got two of her books "Chains" and "Forge" to read. These are part of her SEEDS OF AMERICA series which is aimed at Young Adult Readers... You don't have to be a Young Adult to enjoy these!
Angela Johnson, who is herself a three time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award says that Chains "is searing and has so many brilliant sparks I became lost in it. Isabel's harrowing journey into a nightmare realm of slavery, betrayal;, loss, and ULTIMATELY Hope quite literally had me sobbing."
Why not use these books for HOME SCHOOLING or as part of your classroom projects?
11 January 2011
10 January 2011
05 January 2011
25 December 2010
23 December 2010
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN INSTITUTE and THE ARMONICA
Link above to the BENJAMIN FRANKLIN INSTITUTE
Ben is one of my favorite historical persons.
20 December 2010
17 December 2010
SEARCH FOR AMELIA EARHART : DNA OF BONES FOUND ON ISLAND MAY ANSWER THE QUESTION
Link now to this new article on Amelia Earhart: DNA from bones found on a deserted island may indicate that she lived a while after crashing in the sea or the island nearby.
SEAN MURPHY, Associated Press reporter writes:
" The remains turned up in May and June at what seemed to be an abandoned campsite near where native work crews found skeletal remains in 1940. The pieces appear to be from a cervical bone, a neck bone and a finger.
"But Gillespie offered a word of caution: The fragments could be from a turtle. They were found near a hollowed-out turtle shell that might have been used to collect rain water, but there were no other turtle parts nearby.
"This site tells the story of how someone or some people attempted to live as castaways," Gillespie said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press. Bird and fish carcasses nearby suggested they were prepared and eaten by Westerners.
"These fish weren't eaten like Pacific Islanders" eat fish..."
SEAN MURPHY, Associated Press reporter writes:
" The remains turned up in May and June at what seemed to be an abandoned campsite near where native work crews found skeletal remains in 1940. The pieces appear to be from a cervical bone, a neck bone and a finger.
"But Gillespie offered a word of caution: The fragments could be from a turtle. They were found near a hollowed-out turtle shell that might have been used to collect rain water, but there were no other turtle parts nearby.
"This site tells the story of how someone or some people attempted to live as castaways," Gillespie said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press. Bird and fish carcasses nearby suggested they were prepared and eaten by Westerners.
"These fish weren't eaten like Pacific Islanders" eat fish..."
15 December 2010
SMITHSONIAN ARCHIVES TO SPILL SECRETS
LINK NOW TO THE ARTICLE FROM SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE...
You'll have to wait till 2027 for this:
" The FBI spied on Martin Luther King Jr. in an unsuccessful effort to prove he had ties to Communist organizations. In 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy granted an FBI request to surreptitiously record King and his associates by tapping their phones and placing hidden microphones in their homes, hotel rooms and offices. A 1977 court order sealed transcripts of the surveillance tapes for 50 years."
You'll have to wait till 2027 for this:
" The FBI spied on Martin Luther King Jr. in an unsuccessful effort to prove he had ties to Communist organizations. In 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy granted an FBI request to surreptitiously record King and his associates by tapping their phones and placing hidden microphones in their homes, hotel rooms and offices. A 1977 court order sealed transcripts of the surveillance tapes for 50 years."
10 December 2010
AMERICAN CATHOLIC OFFERS SAINTS OF THE DAY
Here's a link to American Catholic which offers SAINT DAYS for NAMING and also a brief bio of each saint.
This one links to an Italian Saint, Rose of Viterbo
"Catholic saints are holy people and human people who lived extraordinary lives. Each saint the Church honors responded to God's invitation to use his or her unique gifts. God calls each one of us to be a saint.
Finding a correlation between an ancestors name and birthdate as supplied by the Social Security Death Index helped me realize that this person most likely did start out life as a Roman Catholic in Poland.
click on title for link
This one links to an Italian Saint, Rose of Viterbo
"Catholic saints are holy people and human people who lived extraordinary lives. Each saint the Church honors responded to God's invitation to use his or her unique gifts. God calls each one of us to be a saint.
Finding a correlation between an ancestors name and birthdate as supplied by the Social Security Death Index helped me realize that this person most likely did start out life as a Roman Catholic in Poland.
click on title for link
06 December 2010
POLISH ANCESTRY NAMING PATTERN OR SAINT?
Recently I spent an afternoon at the SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY library. As it often goes, I came in looking to break through a brick wall on one line, but while going through books I found one that mentioned that Poles often named their children for the day they were born or baptized. There was a good list and so I decided to compare the names of some Polish ancestors with the Polish (or Eastern-Central European) saints lists.
To my surprise there was a true connection (birthdate and saints day) of 7 out of 10 of the people I chose. Now, does that mean they were simply named for the saint of the day when they were baptised rather than born?
Now, to this day in Poland people often celebrate their saints day as their birthday.
HERE IS WHERE IT GETS TRICKY: YOUR IMMIGRANT POLISH ANCESTORS MAY HAVE USED THEIR SAINTS DAY AS THEIR OFFICIAL BIRTHDAY on U.S. paperwork/records. It is possible that this will correlate with their baptismal in Poland but maybe not.
According to the book I read, POLISH ROOTS by Rosemary Chorzempa, parents sometimes picked a name within up to a three week period surrounding the actual birth.
Because 3 out of the 10 names I checked did not correlate with a saint day, I think this is possibly the name of a family member OR THEIR BAPTISM sponsor.
I'm linking to the Rootsweb list of Polish Saints Names; REMEMBER THAT THESE CATHOLIC CALENDER DATES MAY HAVE CHANGED OVER TIME and that you may be able to determine ethnicity within Poland or other countries by linking the name and the saint!
What this reinforced to me also is the Catholicism of this family.
C 2010 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot
To my surprise there was a true connection (birthdate and saints day) of 7 out of 10 of the people I chose. Now, does that mean they were simply named for the saint of the day when they were baptised rather than born?
Now, to this day in Poland people often celebrate their saints day as their birthday.
HERE IS WHERE IT GETS TRICKY: YOUR IMMIGRANT POLISH ANCESTORS MAY HAVE USED THEIR SAINTS DAY AS THEIR OFFICIAL BIRTHDAY on U.S. paperwork/records. It is possible that this will correlate with their baptismal in Poland but maybe not.
According to the book I read, POLISH ROOTS by Rosemary Chorzempa, parents sometimes picked a name within up to a three week period surrounding the actual birth.
Because 3 out of the 10 names I checked did not correlate with a saint day, I think this is possibly the name of a family member OR THEIR BAPTISM sponsor.
I'm linking to the Rootsweb list of Polish Saints Names; REMEMBER THAT THESE CATHOLIC CALENDER DATES MAY HAVE CHANGED OVER TIME and that you may be able to determine ethnicity within Poland or other countries by linking the name and the saint!
What this reinforced to me also is the Catholicism of this family.
C 2010 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot
02 December 2010
LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY : HAS 10,000 TITLES FROM RESOURCES ALL OVER THE COUNTRY
Did you know that the Central Library genealogy collection has over 10,000 titles and "this exhaustive database is not duplicated in any other California library, and contains documents not even available through the Library of Congress!"
27 November 2010
ANCESTRY DATABASES - THE POSITIVES and THE NEGATIVES : WE NEED TO USE BOOKS AND MICROFILM TOO
Although the Internet and Databases are increasingly valuable to researchers, I don't believe that in my lifetime either will eliminate the need for good "old fashioned" research skills. THE WORST PART OF RELYING on EITHER databases or Internet is that your expectations of how fast you can do research and reality will part ways. That's because there is so much that is not available and some "instant" results may spoil you when what genealogy really takes is PATIENCE!
THERE ARE STILL AREAS OF THE UNITED STATES and THE WORLD that will not give what is considered private information to databases or for microfilming. In those places there are sometimes fees or the information can only be given if you already know the details.
I may have mentioned this before but most of my personal research was done without the use of Internet or databases such as Ancestry. When Ancestry came out I was eager to see how fast the same research would take and learned I was NOT able to duplicate it USING ANCESTRY !
Recently I noticed that corrections were coming up on ANCESTRY. Some of these are provided by subscriber-members.
Every few months I look to see what is new on ANCESTRY and other databases and sometimes I find bits and pieces of information that I did not have, or that would have required archive or library fees or to pay a local researcher. So to me that is worth the exploration.
This is one of the things I did recently when I visited LDS in person; I spent time on each of their database offerings to see what would or would not come up.
To be fair in my review, there were a few pieces of information that I WAS NOT ABLE TO FIND the old fashioned way that did come up on Ancestry. The reason is that while the databases are often of no use where typists have interpreted difficult last names (bad handwriting and no knowledge of surnames in various ethnic languages, especially Slavic names) on the other hand you can SEARCH using first names or other details which may then bring up a family group (and you can see just how horribly spelled the surname was).
This is how I busted a difficult problem for a student of mine who was seeking an African American with an unusual first name and for a student of mine who was seeking his Polish great-grandfather in the state of New York.
C 2010 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot
THERE ARE STILL AREAS OF THE UNITED STATES and THE WORLD that will not give what is considered private information to databases or for microfilming. In those places there are sometimes fees or the information can only be given if you already know the details.
I may have mentioned this before but most of my personal research was done without the use of Internet or databases such as Ancestry. When Ancestry came out I was eager to see how fast the same research would take and learned I was NOT able to duplicate it USING ANCESTRY !
Recently I noticed that corrections were coming up on ANCESTRY. Some of these are provided by subscriber-members.
Every few months I look to see what is new on ANCESTRY and other databases and sometimes I find bits and pieces of information that I did not have, or that would have required archive or library fees or to pay a local researcher. So to me that is worth the exploration.
This is one of the things I did recently when I visited LDS in person; I spent time on each of their database offerings to see what would or would not come up.
To be fair in my review, there were a few pieces of information that I WAS NOT ABLE TO FIND the old fashioned way that did come up on Ancestry. The reason is that while the databases are often of no use where typists have interpreted difficult last names (bad handwriting and no knowledge of surnames in various ethnic languages, especially Slavic names) on the other hand you can SEARCH using first names or other details which may then bring up a family group (and you can see just how horribly spelled the surname was).
This is how I busted a difficult problem for a student of mine who was seeking an African American with an unusual first name and for a student of mine who was seeking his Polish great-grandfather in the state of New York.
C 2010 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot
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