This will be the last Saturday Serendipity for about two weeks while we take our annual break paddling, hiking and swimming in the wonderful outdoors of the Adirondacks. Suggested reads for this week are as follows . . .
1. American Ancestors/NEHGS has a major sale going on for genealogy and history related books. The discounts being offered are up to 50% off usual prices. The deeply discounted books are not all New England-centric. You can look over the eight pages of offered books here.
2. Diane MacLean Boumenot, of One Rhode Island Family blog, is back with a post this week! Read "What Was Your Rhode Island Ancestor Doing in 1834?" and find a list of 2,200 names on a petition that just might help you answer that question if you have Rhode Island roots. You can read Diane's post here.
3. With the recent news that AncestryDNA is going to eliminate many small segment matches from its matching algorithm, The Legal Genealogist, Judy Russell, posted this week about the controversy and says simply, "Chill!" Read why here.
4. Laura Mattingly, of The Old Trunk in the Attic blog, posted (in these days of another raging pandemic) a timely and poignant piece this week about one of her relatives. Read "A Few Days Illness" here.
5. Staying with a pandemic theme, another timely post this week was by Jen, of The JenGenX Files blog. With the incongruously controversial polemics surrounding the opening of our schools during a raging pandemic, Jen provides a glimpse backwards to the Great Influenza of 1918-19 to provide what should be seen as an object lesson for us today. Read, "Pandemic of the past" here.
6. As any dedicated family historian/genealogist knows (or soon learns), delving into family history can reveal the good, the bad, the unexpected, and the ugly; but a full and true family history has to live with the facts or avoid them and live with an incomplete or potentially false narrative about the family's evolution over time. It is with this issue in mind at some level that after much discussion the Indiana Historical Society has made the 1920s KKK membership records from Hamilton County, Indiana (which includes Indianapolis) available to the public. Some 1,660 membership cards are now able to be reviewed. You can read more about this collection here. [Note that to gain full access to the article you might have to answer a one quetion consumer survey, such as "Name as many mattress manufactureres you have heard about." Quite painless to gain access to the full article.]
7. And finally, as we are all now living through what has been called a once-in-a-century disease pandemic, it is always interesting to learn (a) that our pandemic is really not unprecedented, and (b) that this pandemic could get a whole lot worse than it currently is if we do not act now and learn from what happened in 1918-1919. Read here Marian Burk Wood's post at Climbing My Family Tree blog. Marian writes this week about the discovery of a relative of her husband's who enlisted in the Union Army and lived until 1919 when he died of the influenza during the Great Influenza pandemic (misnamed and often still refered to as the "Spanish Flu"). We now have over 4 million cases of COVID19 in the US and the death toll is over 145,000 and climbing, but in 1918-19 the U.S. death toll reached at least 675,000 so we are presently only at just over 1/4th the number of flu deaths in 1918 and counting upward each and every day. Be smart, Stay safe, and Stay healthy!
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Copyright 2020, John D. Tew
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