ARE DNA TESTING COMPANIES GOING TO GO BUST? SEEMS THE DNA TESTING BOOM IS OVER

YAHOO FINANCE : ONCE HOT DNA TESTING article by Daniel Roberts

Excerpt: It isn't just 23andme. DNA tests went boom in 2018 with the number of consumers who had bought one doubling to 25 million, now sales have gone bust.

MIT Technology Review estimates that the largest DNA test players sold just 4 million to 6 million DNA tests in 2019, an industry growth rate of 20 %, the slowest year for the industry ever.

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I have never done my DNA and to my knowledge, neither has anyone in my family.  These companies and their owners have gotten rich, but the aspect of privacy invasion and your data no longer being yours (after about 20 years but currently for the use of law enforcement) is also in my opinion an aspect of the decline in interest.  Further while DNA can help you if you're truly blocked, sometimes it's impatience or amateur genealogy that's the issue.  Currently I have a friend who is stuck due to a common name and reportage of birth place different on three different census in the 1800's.  I told her I've seen death certificates from the 1940's and before in which children do not know their mother's maiden name.

2020 is CELEBRATION of 100 YEARS OF WOMEN's VOTE

Whatever your political persuasion, and though many feel their vote is worthless, I hope that all my readers who are citizens of the United States will use their vote in upcoming election which I feel to be more important than ever.  

This year is 100 years since women (but for African American women in some states and Native American women) got the right to vote.  It was hard won.  Women called "suffragettes" rather than "feminists", fought for this right. It took over 40 years.

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE GOV: HISTORY OF WOMEN'S RIGHT TO VOTE

EXCERPT: Even though they were legally able to vote now, African American women were often barred from the polls. American Indian women were also not considered U.S. citizens until 1924 and could not vote.

image from Wikipedia

It was a process.

Once Women got the right to vote in 1920 when the 19th Amendment was ratified, they also got the right (and responsibility) to file for their own citizenship.  If you are doing African-American research, you want to check what state your ancestor was in and when African-American women there got the right to vote. Remember that there were local and state efforts by women to gain the vote as the momentum built over decades.  Learning the niche history of your ancestor's voting and citizenship status can be an interesting addition to your family history writing.  Before this it was assumed that the head of household - a man - voted as a representative of his family and that women's opinions ought to reflect that of their husbands.

So before women got the right to vote, they could become citizens by being included in their father's petition - also any children under the age of 18 would have been included.  And yet, there was a punishment in place for women who married men who were not citizens yet and that was that they lost their own citizenship. 

In my years as a genealogist, I have seen that some widows petitioned for their own citizenship and that of their children. So many immigrant men did dangerous work and lost their lives and there were many widows on their own until a possible remarriage. Perhaps remarriage was easy for the 20 somethings but an older widow with many children could find herself living the rest of her life without a husband to support her. 


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TO YOUR FUTURE

BEST WISHES

May all of  you who are in pursuit of genealogy and family history have wonderful holidays and an enlightening New Year - 2020.

NIGHT TRAIN

HOLIDAYS A PERFECT TIME TO COLLECT WHAT WILL BE FAMILY MEMORIES

It seems to me that the American Holidays are a down time for genealogy but an up time to collect what will become family memorabilia for future generations. 

These days photographing people and things and uploading them rather than printing out photos is the way to go, though I still like to print out a copy for my files.  I also like to ask questions and do interviews, though I wish so much that I had recorded them in the past so that I could hear my relative's voices again.

The other day I was watching an old movie from the 1970's.  I knew it was old because of the telephone being used. These days few people have land lines. Remember party lines?  (A shared line meant that someone in your close neighborhood could pick up and listen to your personal conversations.) There's a history of technology in films and today the use of a cell phone is incorporated in action as are the latest in computers and other technology.  So a film can easily become dated quickly.  I still remember my dad getting really excited by Jurassic Park (the first film) when he realized that some dinosaur DNA was in the faux can of shaving creme that went down the falls.  Now millions have taken DNA tests for themselves.

Why not ask your visiting relatives to tell you about their first telephone, or television, or computer, and keep that testimonial as a memory?  Ask your grandparents when their parents first had a phone, television, or computer and what kind it was.  Did they use it for local and long distance?  Remember before Unlimited Cell Phone Use that long distance could be expensive and some families reserved calls for wishing Merry Christmas to their far away relatives?

What television shows did various family members like?  Watch together?

How about favorite films?  Actors?

These days the availability of old shows and clips from old shows makes re-watching them possible. You might find that you don't like the humor, that it makes you wince.  That's the reaction I had when watching old shows - The Honeymooners, with the threats of wife beating, and The Three Stooges, with the violence of hitting Larry around his head. The violence as funny was not to me. But these were popular shows, so what does that say about American culture when they were popular?

There is a strong argument that computer animated games have stoked violence.

I also watched some old stand up comedy on YouTube because some of my family loved the Johnny Carson Show.; you're not going to find too many comedians who weren't sexist or insulting. Yet, people also seemed more willing to understand what joking was. Those times domestically were not as violent as life is today because school yard bullies existed and there were gangs and organized crime but terrorists and mass killings of innocent people who were just in the wrong place at the right time were rare in America.  

THANKSGIVING

SHE AWAITS WORD OF HER MARRIAGE

A HUNDRED YEARS OF MAP CHANGES

CHANGES: maps, borders, governments, leaders, languages, religions, place names, locations of archives.

SEARCH FOR HERITAGE - ORPHANAGE - ADOPTION - LOVING HOME Research Path Heritage Search # Nine : Conclusion

This concludes a series of posts describing a genealogy search I worked on. You can click on the tab that says "Research Path Heritage Search 1" or search through the blog in order to follow from start to finish. (July 21, 2019 was the first post.)  

To recap, I was asked to do genealogy research for someone who seemed most interested in locating the towns in Europe where his ancestors had left in the early to mid 1800's but the way was blocked by the mystery of his birth mother's heritage. Born in marriage but left in an orphanage as a baby, this woman was raised by nuns and would have been emancipated into homelessness but for the friendship of another orphan. She moved to another state and in with her friend but, being unworldly, she was seduced and abandoned. And so, she put her baby into an orphanage where he was adopted young. Years later he managed to get his original birth certificate and find his birth mother, who had been waiting for a reunion. Before she died, she spoke of her memories and left some clues...

I had stored most of my research unpublished in FamilySearch and made myself some copies and had filed them away.  What was available for free was limited.  I advised we send away to get records of her baptism and any information on when and who had put her in the orphanage. 

Finally, a phone call came. In a quiet voice the man said, "I just got the letter from the Catholic Diocese archives.  Should I read it to you?"

Reiterating the birth date we had correctly, the letter stated that the child had been turned over to them not as an infant but over the age of 2 and had been baptized a month later.  On the baptism was stated the name of the parents: the couple was one of my candidates all along. The oral history was wrong as was the man's memory.

The original story of an infant being taken to the orphanage and her mother's death in childbirth or soon after was wrong. 

I met up with the man the next day and went into my notes and searches and printed out all the applicable information for this correct couple - the birth parents. Now he remembered his birth mother saying she had visited her mother, who was an invalid. It was clear to me that she had probably been over the age of 6 to have remembered this visit and there had been no discussion of her actually having every met her mother in her lifetime before.

But I understood that the man had a lot to think about.  He had wanted the truth and he said he felt "Relief."  Yet something to think about now was that her birth father had lived into a reasonable old age. He was said to have visited her until he died. She would have been about 12 when he died. Having found the tombstone of the couple I suggested we contact the cemetery and ask for the burial record and also send away for death certificates to see what they died of.  He said he had enough information.  I dropped it, but I feel knowing might be helpful to understanding.

In another case the doctor's details on a death certificate about how he had tended to a woman for twelve years of TB, was impactful. It revealed a woman lingering in illness and hoping to beat it so that she could be reunited with her child, which might have made adoption an impossibility in her mind.

Because we had the information we needed, I was able to link into another genealogist's unproofed research and provide him the names of four towns that his ancestors had left in Europe. I explained that this information was unproofed and where I found it.  He can easily find it and look over it.

THE END

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