Saturday Serendipity (September 23, 2017)

Here are a few recommendations for reading this weekend  .  .  .

1.  Do you, other members of your family, or any of your ancestors and relatives have blue eyes?  Well, genetic analysis has a probable answer to why that is.  AND, all us with blue eyes likely have  a single common ancestor from a particular area of the globe! Of course, as always, the trick is to identify him or her (good luck going that far back!)  Read here about the origin of blue eyes and what geneticists now think about its development.        

2.  Every family probably has examples of embarassing spitefulness in ancestors or relatives, but The Weekly Genealogist of NEHGS referenced this week a spite story for the ages.  Read here about the "Spite Fence" in San Francisco and the Yung/Crocker feud that went on for almost 30 years. 

3.  Here is a very interesting article link (again from The Weekly Genealogist) that is also more than a bit eerie on some level. Wouldn't it be exciting if we could reconstruct what pre-DNA discovery, pre-photography, long-deceased ancestors looked like? Well if you somehow have a DNA sample of a long-deceased ancestor or relative hanging around, artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg presaged as far back as 2012 the coming of DNA technology to do just that. Ms Dewey-Hagborg was concerned about how we were unknowingly and inadvertently leaving behind our DNA in so many places that we were unintentionally creating real issues of biological surveillance. As a demonstration of what she meant, she collected DNA from discarded items such as gum, cigarette butts, and shed or discarded hair strands and then created images of what the anonymous strangers might look like from their cast-off DNA samples. Now a tech firm named Human Longevity has announced that it can create a fairly accurate rendition of what a stranger looks like from a DNA sample!  Read more about this development and the controversy developing around it here.            
        
4.  As we are at the century mark following the "war to end all wars" (also incongruously known as World War I), the last remnants of living Civil War memory must be long gone, right? Well, not so fast. It seems that there is one person age 87 who is still receiving a pension from the Veterans Administration 152 years after the end of that war. How, and why, and how much you might ask .  .  .  especially when you learn that the last person who had a pension based on service in the Civil war died at 109 years old in 1956, and the last Civil War widow died in 2008 at the age of 93. Read here to find out the answers.  

5.  Janine Adams of Organize Your Family History blog has a post this week that cautions about taking newspaper articles at face value when using them as genealogy sources. She is still a newspaper enthusiast as a genealogy resource, but she has tempered her position for the reason explained here.     

6.  Life From The Roots blog by Barbara Poole became a different kind of blog over the last year or so. Barbara is a good photographer and she has made her New England-based blog into a kind of photo essay/travelogue for various towns and historical locations in New England. It is especially useful for those with New England roots who are not able to easily visit places their ancestors and relatives might have lived. This week Barbara serves up a photo smorgasbord of St. Johnsbury, Vermont.  Have a look and read here.

7.  And finally for this week, Laura Mattingly of The Old Trunk in the Attic blog has posted another orphan photograph in the hope it might find a home with a descendant or relative. The portrait is of what could be a newlywed couple from circa 1910 in or around Clay, Hamilton, or York County, Nebraska. It was created by a photographer named Soderberg who lived in Sutton, Nebraska in 1910.  If you have family that lived in these areas of Nebraska, have a look here, maybe you can help someone get a a never-before-seen portrait of some ancestors or relatives!  
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Copyright 2017, John D. Tew

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