BABY NAME BOOKS : GET A CLUE!

I just love baby name books, because of the meanings attributed to the names, and all the different spellings offered.  I wonder, "What would someone named Ursula be like?" (Having never met an Ursula in real life!)

Though there are many baby name books out there, as well as many baby name sites on the web, there simply cannot be a totally comprehensive index of names. 

One of the pleasures of genealogy is coming across names you've never heard of before, names from history, names that have gone out of fashion, names waiting to be resurrected by the naming of a new baby, or perhaps the renaming a poet does for themselves!

Genealogy research - doing those charts - sometimes makes us aware of how a name has been used and repeated in a family for generations. 

One research quest I worked on featured the name Dicey for women.  I don't think I ever made it to the Original Dicey, but I did get back to the family just arrived from Scotland in the 1700's.

Watching the feminine forms of masculine names such as Julianna, the great grandmother of Julius, may or may not give us a clue about the relationship.  In this case, no one in America had ever heard of the great grandmother in Hungary, but I was able to confirm that in childhood it was this woman, not Julius' mother, who provided him care as an infant.  The family must have known it was going to be that way before he was born.

These days there are many creative names.  I find this particularly true in the Black community.  Using baby books and other references I found that one of the most popular Black names in America, Lakeisha, is a made up name.  In other words, not one book I looked at said that it's a name that came from Africa, or some other ethnic group and one book said it was an invention.  (I even have a friend who named her dog Lakeisha!)

Next month, February, I'll be looking into African American research and history once again remembering how interesting using the Freedman Bank Records database is, and the mystery of African-American / Black given and surnames can be.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC GENOME PROJECT CONTINUES ON!

I wrote about the National Geographic Genome project a while back and today I decided to see what was happening with it, since I recently met a couple people who said they had paid the $199. and sent their results in to be shared.  I thought the project had ended, but apparently not.  It is ongoing and in real time!

Here's the link : NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DNA TEST : GENO 2.0

PEW INSTITUTE ON BIRTHRATES : IMMIGRANTS HAVING CHILDREN WHO ELSE?

SOCIAL TRENDS : PEW INSTITUTE : FEW BABIES BEING BORN  link to full article.

OK, it used to be a woman had little to no choice about having children.  Her opinions were to be a married woman, a nun, or maybe, rarely, a "spinster" schoolteacher or nurse.  (Some of us know our mothers had to quit their jobs when they got married, some of us remember being told on interviews when we asked about future prospects of the job, "you'll just get married anyway.")  Then, birth control happened, as did abortion.  These days many people are in full control of their fertility and have decided they just can't afford a child, not in this economy anyway.

WHO WILL THEIR BE TO DO OUR GENEALOGY?

WILL THE ROYAL BABY BE A VICTORIA OR A PHILLIP?

NAMING A ROYAL BABY : article from DIGITAL JOURNAL OP ED by Martin Kujawa link to full article.

I enjoyed reading Kujawa's article and speculated that the Royal Couple will probably follow tradition, and maybe have a whole lot of people butting in about what to name their baby, which, reading other articles, was announced to be due in July and most likely not a twin!  Meanwhile in Great Britain there is word that there will be some changes.  First that the child will be titled Princess or Prince right away, second that if it be a female, she will still be first in line to the thone, and third that the Royal personage destined to be King or Queen may marry a Catholic, and finally, that Prince Charles is wondering about what this all means because the King or Queen of England is also head of the church.

OK, so I am not expecting this Royal Baby to be named Tiffany or Roger!

DOES YOUR FAMILY HAVE A DOLLAR PRINCESS ?

DAISY GOODWIN ON DOLLAR PRINCESSES from THE DAILY BEAST/NEWSWEEK link to full article here.

From Ancestry Worship Genealogy:  OK, Winston Churchill had American blood and so did Lady Diana Spencer...  Dollar Princesses are the American heiresses who married titled Europeans, moved to Europe, and became the grandmothers and great grandmothers of some illustrious people.  Mary Leiter, the Chicago department-store heiress who married Lord Curzon is another Dollar Princess. Florence Sharon, a senator’s daughter from Nevada, who married Lord Hesketh yet another.

 Aren't you intregued?


Daisy Goodwin is a historical fiction author who knows her subject.

IMMIGRANT SHIPS TRANSCRIPTION GUILD : OVER A DECADE OF VOLUNTEERISM : ALWAYS SEEKING NEW RECRUITS!

IMMIGRANT SHIPS TRANSCRIPTION GUILD  link to their official home page.

The Guild has been working on transcription of passenger lists.  They have transcribed over 12,000 ship lists which are in thirteen volumes.  Their Compass which points to the fact that immigrants came on ships to ports besides the well known New York port.  Their volunteer work provides information to the genealogy researching public that is at no charge as a public service.

I remember years ago researching for someones lost branch of family in Texas.  The branch wasn't just lost.  Back in the early 20th century a family member married someone who wasn't Jewish and she was kicked out of the family.  She and her non-Jewish husband left New York and moved to Texas.  I was able with the help of an archive and museum in Texas to locate these people through Galveston Texas.  It was thought they had taken the train from New York to Chicago and then through New Mexico - and there were train routes and transfers that would have provided the transportation, but instead they went to Galveston by boat, sailing down the Atlantic coast and through the Gulf of Mexico. 

The main page also links to a lot of helpful information.  I was just browsing Janet's page on Germans from Russia, immigrants into New York, Baltimore, Galveston, and Philadelphia.

SAVING THE NATIONAL TREASURES : NOVA DVD : THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

This was a fascinating film, about restoration efforts to preserve our founding documents, focusing on the preservation of the much faded Declaration of Independence. In the 1940's a dead bug had infiltrated the state of the art case for the parchments and had eaten some of the edging. An effort to preserve the documents from all natural disasters including the atom bomb was made. It might have been state of the art but it was not good enough.

In the 1990's technology had advanced and so a team of experts - perhaps too many - came together to debate and design the cases. Crystals were forming on the surface of the parchment. Even vibration could have been damaging the documents. Helium gas had been used and was leaking. There is always the problem of humidity. The new case uses argon gas. An effort to include silica for humidity control was dismissed.

Funniest thing. The whole operation of moving the documents and restoring them was a secret operation. CODE NAME ELVIS!

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.)