Saturday Serendipity (March 26, 2016)

The recommended items of interest for this week are as follows . . . 

1.   Today is the last Saturday in March and therefore this is the last opportunity for Saturday Serendipity to recognize Women's History Month with a recommended "listen" as opposed to a recommended read (as is more usual for Saturday Serendipity). This week I return to Nate DiMeo's audio podcast, the memory palace, to recommend you listen to his piece on Margaret Knight. To learn who Margaret was and why she has an important (though little known) place in Women's History, have a listen to Episode 78: No. 116,842.  You will be glad you did.  

2.  The Weekly Genealogist by NEHGS mentioned a very useful and interesting piece this week that ran in the Boston Globe. Almost all of us at one point or another have been flummoxed and frustrated by the need to decode and transcribe the cursive handwriting in old land records, diaries, letters, etc. The Norfolk County Registry of Deeds in Massachusetts is now about to complete a project designed to transcribe handwritten land records from 1793 to 1900. To learn more about this project, which is underway at the registry in Dedham and is said to be the first project of its kind, go here.   

3.  Judy Russell, The Legal Genealogist, has a new post about a birth location puzzle she and a cousin have encountered based on their research. The puzzle emerged when they participated in the recent challenge to color code the location of the birth of ancestors.  Read about the challenge and their conundrum here.  Judy also provides a link for a template to create your own color-coded chart of ancestor birth locations.

4.  I must admit that the various commonalities and causation pedigrees that many genealogists have created for their families is a new and intriguing concept to me. Laura Mattingly of Old Trunk in the Attic blog posted last weekend about her creation of a pedigree chart to depict the common characteristics and experiences she shares with her ancestors. Read about these kinds of projects and Laura's creation here.

5.  As part of a continuing interest in mentioning possible esoteric sources for genealogy clues and data, I came across a post at The Vault that could hold some very sad but hidden nuggets for some genealogists. A recently published book by Peter Manseau titled, "Melancholy Accidents: Three Centuries of Stray Bullets and Bad Luck," collects notices of fire arms tragedies from 1739 to 1916. It might be possible for some mysteries about ancestor or relative deaths to be answered by investigating the information in this book.  To read more about the book and to see several of the newspaper notices the author collected, go here. 

6.  And finally, since as genealogists we all deal with the subject of death in one way or another, there is a lengthy, but very interesting, piece at Wait But Why blog about the dream of defeating death through what is called "cryonics" or "cryogenics" (the freezing of the body after death).  About 300 people are presently being preserved in vats of liquid nitrogen in the hope of one day being able to live again. How does this process work and what is the procedure for becoming a "cryonicist?" If interested, you can read much more about this subject here.    
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Copyright 2016, John D. Tew

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