Hillary Clinton and the King's Daughter's

****The following is taken from Dick Eastman in the EOGN for 8 Jan 2009:

Eastern Canada was originally settled by French adventurers, fur trappers, and soldiers. There were plenty of men but few women in the early days. The French government realized this was a problem and soon recruited young, single women to travel to New France. These women, known in French as the "filles du roi" or in English as the "King's Daughters," agreed to travel to the new settlements in North America and marry a settler there in exchange for a 50 pound dowry from the French King. Of the nearly 1,000 women who undertook the journey, about 800 made it to Canada.

Upon arrival, the women made contracts of marriage with the men who had originally settled the New World and usually married within a few days or weeks of the contract signing.

Sometimes the women broke the contracts, only to remake them or make new contracts with other men.

These couples were the founding families of Quebec and today have millions of descendants all over the world. Rosemary E. Bachelor has published an article that lists some of Hillary Clinton's descent from those early Quebec families. Hillary shares ancestors with former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, writer Jack Kerouac, singer Shania Twain, Madonna, Celine Dion, Angelina Jolie, Camilla Shand (wife of England’s Prince Charles) and with myself.

You can read more in Rosemary E. Bachelor's article at http://genealogy.suite101.com/article.cfm/hillary_clintons_french_ancestry.

Are Digitalization of Records Missing Your Ancestors?

Genea-Musings blogger Randy Seaver brings up a seldom-raised issue: the quality and completeness of records digitization projects between the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and its partners Footnote, FamilySearch and Ancestry.com.

His post stems from a discussion on a professional genealogists’ mailing list. A list member experienced with NARA records did a spot check: She noted the first 25 names on a NARA microfilm reel of Civil War pension index cards and searched for those names in Ancestry.com’s pension index database. She found just one of the names. (I can hear you thinking "I knew it!")

The researcher said the cards that didn’t scan well from the microfilm were left out of the database (Ancestry.com’s source information states 10 percent of the cards are “missing;” she puts the percentage higher).

The researcher also questioned the wisdom of scanning colored documents in black and white, pointing to Footnote's Civil War widows' pensions project.

A NARA staff member explained that partner digitization projects use original records or the highest-quality “master” microfilm and are subject to quality controls. Other, non-partner projects may have digitized records from second- or third-generation film, resulting in poorer images.

He also said NARA does make original records available, even after they’re digitized, to "researchers who need to see them."

A respondent from Ancestry.com commented that the microfilmed Civil War pension index cards were particularly difficult to scan because some cards were on dark paper, and the technology available at the time was inferior to today's.

See Seaver’s entire post here.

He raises good questions at the end.It’s easy and comforting to assume genealogy databases have every surviving document in a particular record set. This is a reminder that’s not always the case.


Genealogy Industry
1/6/2009 12:52:18 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)


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Taken from:
Family Tree's "GENEALOGY INSIDER" by Diane Haddad.

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New Method to Revolutionize DNA Sequencing

Taken from Dick Eastman in EOGN 5 Jan. 2009:

New Method To Revolutionize DNA Sequencing

A new article in the Foresight Institute's web site describes a new method of DNA sequencing. The article is quite technical so I will leave it to others to describe the "3000 ZMWs (waveguides)" and other techniques used. What caught my eye is a claim that "Company founder Stephen Turner estimates that such a chip would be able to sequence an entire human genome in under half an hour to 99.999 per cent accuracy for under $1000."

Forget 9 markers, forget 24 markers, forget 32 markers. These folks are talking about ALL the markers. Not only will this help identify ancestry, it also opens up all sorts of possibilities about identifying diseases and other inherited traits. If the price this year is to be $1,000, what will the price be ten years from now? Probably only a fraction of this year's price.

Details are available at http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=2919.

It's Not What You Find, It's What You Do With It

We’ve come a long way technologically with family history research tools. Years ago locating a record sometimes meant many hours cranking away at a microfilm reader and often transcribing the record because there was no machine to print it out. Now, with many records, we can sit in the comfort of our homes and locate our ancestors with the click of a mouse. Another click prints a copy, and with another click we can attach it to our electronic family tree. Voila! We’re done.

Ah, not so fast. While I love the advances that technology has brought us, sometimes we’re a little too quick to attach the record to our tree and move on. That wonderful find is relegated to a kind of electronic purgatory where we never fully explore it.

Here are some steps you can take to ensure that you’re getting the most from every find:

1. Transcribe it.While this might seem a bit tedious, the act of transcribing a record forces you to read and think about every element of the record. You’ll be amazed at how much more you can glean from a find when you examine it closely.

2. Put it in context. Create a chronology or timeline for all the records you’ve found on your ancestor and copy your transcription into that timeline. Seeing the information in the context of other information you have found can help you to estimate important dates and learn more about your ancestor.

3. Create an action or to-do list. While you’re plucking clues from your new find, ideas will pop into your head for follow-ups. Keep a to-do list open on your desktop and add these ideas as they come to you. That way you don’t risk forgetting about them, and the next time you get a chance to return to your research, you know exactly where to start.

4. Add it to your tree. O.K., if you haven’t already done it, now is a good time to click and add that record to your online tree and/or genealogical software. You may have to do this in more than one place if you maintain an online tree and another in a genealogical software program.

5. File a paper copy.I like to keep a paper copy of what I’ve found. When I’m looking for a new angle, I find that browsing through paper copies is helpful. Plus, when it comes to showing family what I’ve found, most people seem to respond better to browsing through a binder than clicking through electronic files on a computer.

6. Pat yourself on the back.With every record you find, you’re adding a piece to your family history puzzle. Take some time to appreciate each find and know that you’re doing your part to preserve your family’s place in history.

Have you perhaps been too hasty in dismissing a recent find? During these cold winter months venturing outdoors on slippery roads to do research isn’t very appealing. Winter is an ideal time to revisit what you’ve found and search for clues you may have missed the first time around and pursue new leads online.

****The above was taken from: The Ancestry Weekly Journal, and was written by Juliana Smith.

The Finger of Blame

From "The Herald" in "jolly old England" comes the following regarding a Croftamie historian:

CROFTAMIE historian Sion Barrington gave a reading in Strachur concerning the Rev Ebenezer Erskine, tragically tasked centuries before with conducting his own wife's funeral.

The burial process was later disturbed by the unscrupulous sexton. He opened the unfortunate young woman's coffin, stealing her wedding ring by hacking off her finger with a knife - whereupon the "corpse" sat up, having merely been comatose, going on to recover completely.

One of Mrs Erskine's descendants was in Sion's audience, pointing out that the gravedigger had, in fact, severed her apparently-lifeless finger with his spade, the ring remaining a treasured Erskine family heirloom.

Out of politenesss, Sion refrained from asking about the finger.

[This was just too cute of a story NOT to include here!]

cbh

Macabre "Bopper" Item on eBay!

Rock 'n' roll's most macabre historical artifact will go on the block when the family of the late 1950s pop star J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson auctions his casket on eBay sometime in the next few weeks - almost 50 years after "the day the music died."

The Big Bopper's 16-gauge steel casket was exhumed last year from his original grave at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Beaumont so it could be moved to a more visible location with a life-sized statue and historic marker. The disinterment also offered forensic experts a chance - with his family's blessing - to examine the pop singer's unautopsied remains after his death in rock 'n' roll's first great tragedy.

On Feb. 3, 1959, Richardson died at age 28 in the crash of a small plane in a field near Clear Lake, Iowa, that also killed 1950s rock stars Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens and sent a shock wave around the world. The accident has since been immortalized as "the day the music died."
Richardson was buried a few days later in his Beaumont hometown with great fanfare, including tributes from Elvis Presley and others.

Jay Richardson, the Bopper's son, plans to sell the empty casket on eBay to raise money for a musical show about his father and to keep the Bopper's memory alive. Born three months after the crash, Jay, who lives in Katy, never met his father in life - but saw him for the first time at his exhumation.

"Wouldn't it be wonderful to bring Dad back to life?" Jay, 49, said recently from Canada, where he was touring with a tribute act to his father, Holly and Valens.

"I have no personal use for the casket," he said. "When you get down to it, it is just a metal box. More important is what this particular metal box represents.

"In another 200 years, will people care about rock 'n' roll?" Jay asks. "Who knows? But why would I want to destroy it? Even though it was Dad's resting place for 48 years, it's also a unique opportunity to learn more about the early years of rock 'n' roll."

The exhumed casket is in surprisingly good condition after 48 years in the muddy gumbo of Southeast Texas. It bears minor rust spots and a white lime stain showing where several inches of water once leaked into the surrounding vault, but there was no evidence water had ever seeped into the casket itself.

Inside, forensic examiners found the Big Bopper's well-preserved corpse, dressed in a black suit and a blue-and-gray striped tie. He wore socks, but no shoes. Most remarkably, his thick brown hair was still perfectly coiffed in his familiar, 1950s flat-top.

After the 2007 autopsy found he died of crash-related injuries, the Big Bopper was reburied in a sleek new casket donated by the Batesville Casket Co., which made the original. Since late last year, the old casket has been on public display at the Texas Musicians Museum in Hillsboro, Texas.

Tom Kreason, the museum's founder and a rock historian who has developed collections for the legendary Sun Records Museum in Memphis and the Hard Rock Cafe©, admits the casket is macabre but says it is a "priceless" artifact of a historic moment in music.

"We gave it a name. We called it 'the day the music died' and there's no title bestowed on any other tragic days since," Kreason said. "No one knew, then, what was being created. This (casket) is very symbolic of how we lost three incredible artists, but it's also a statement about what we've lost with many other artists, too."

The Big Bopper died right as he was hitting the big time. The happy-go-lucky Texas deejay in a leopard-skin jacket would sell a million records but never see a dime from his greatest hit, "Chantilly Lace," a two-minute 1959 novelty song that is both innocent and suggestive.

Richardson, who also wrote the George Jones hit, "White Lightning," was toying with an idea he had for a new kind of jukebox that would play short films of musicians playing their hits. He called them "music videos."

Kreason approached some auction houses about selling the casket, but "they all seemed confused," so he decided to reach for a wider audience on eBay, an Internet site without borders. The Texas Musicians Museum will receive an undisclosed share of the sale, he said.

How much could a used celebrity casket bring on the open market? A handful of memorabilia dealers shied away from guessing, largely because a used celebrity casket has never been offered for sale and morbid curiosity could quickly decompose into open protest.

In the past year, hundreds of visitors have seen the Big Bopper's casket at Kreason's museum, where it's displayed much as it appeared in a 1959 funeral home photo, along with a reproduction of a guitar-shaped wreath sent by Elvis Presley. Nobody has complained about the grim exhibit, but both Kreason and Richardson expect some protests when it hits eBay.

"Certainly there'll be some distaste, but I think this is a piece of history that is very special," Kreason said. "Even if it doesn't sell, we've made a point about the historical value of J.P. Richardson. No matter what happens, he wins, historically."

Taken from :Beaumont Enterprise" written as: "Big Bopper's casket a macabre marketable on e-bay"
By RON FRANSCELL
December, 27, 2008

Organizing for 2009

Okay, so my office here does NOT look like the one Dear Myrtle describes in her articles, but I couldn't think of a better way to help all of you get organized for the new year!

Dear Myrtle [you can read her Blogs at http://www.dearmyrtle.com/ ] has come up with a wonderful checklist for getting organized in January for a whole year long of genealogy bliss! You can't go wrong in following these suggestions!

To see Ol Myrt's suggestions in PDF format, so you can save or print them off, you can visit her January Checklist at: http://www.dearmyrtle.com/09/JanuaryOrganizationChecklist.pdf

So, Get Organized!!!!

Happy 2009 to all!

cbh