Saturday Serendipity (January 18, 2020)

Here are a few suggested reads for this weekend .  .  .

1.     Big news recently for anyone with roots in Ireland.  The Weekly Genealogist by NEHGS linked this week to the news that Irish birth, marriage, and death records are being made available to the public on-line at no charge.  Read about the details here.  

2.     And now a periodic reminder that Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings blog does genealogy buffs the great service of summarizing more than just his regular "Genealogy News Bytes" feature (the latest of which can be seen here).  Randy also takes the time to do periodic detailed summaries of added and updated record collections available for geneaology research.  This week he presents a long list of additions and updates at Family Search.org.  Have a look here .  You might find it a useful tool to help focus your research and save you time in getting to the materials you want or need.  And you might discover record collections of which you were not previously aware.     

3.     My attention was grabbed this week by the opening Generation 1 summary in a "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" post by Elizabeth Handler of From Maine to Kentucky blog.  It was the last sentence that intrigued me and got me to read the entire post and then analyze the very helpful descent chart Elizabeth provided.  The sentence was, "Thomas and Anna [Stanton] had ten children, and I descend from their sons Joseph, Robert and Samuel."  My Mayflower descent from Richard Warren involves descent from two of his daughters, but descent from three brothers?  How does that work?  Read Elizabeth's post here and then look at her chart to track the path.    

4.     Peking to Beijing .  .  . Bombay to Mumbai .  .  . Burma to Myanmar and now Holland to Netherlands.  If you always referred to Amsterdam being in the Netherlands because you knew that technically Holland only refers to two of the twelve jurisdictions that make up the whole of the Netherlands, then you will not need to make the mental shift from Holland to Netherlands that is being instituted in 2020 by the country of Netherlands.  Read more about the reasons for the reprogramming underway by going here.  

5.     The Weekly Genealogist of NEHGS also linked to a fascinating story this week titled, "Back From The Dead."  It is about how a granddaughter's interest in genealogy led to her grandfather's trip to Israel's national museum of Holocaust commemoration at Yad Vashem to correct the record that had him as dead for more than sixty years; he was there to register himself as officially still alive and he was accompanied by eight newly discover Israeli and American relatives!  Read the full story here.

6.     And finally,  Peter Muise of the delightful blog NEW ENGLAND FOLKLORE, posted a very interesting piece about the two oldest Elm trees in the Western Hemisphere.  They were planted by John Hancock and you might be wondering about how they survived the infamous Dutch Elm disease.  Read Peter's post here to find out where the trees are located and why they have survived to this day. 

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Copyright 2020, John D. Tew

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