STRANGERS IN THE BOX by Pam Harazim Come, look with me inside this drawer, In this box I’ve often seen, At the pictures, black and white, Faces proud, still, and serene. I wish I knew the people, These strangers in the box, Their names and all their memories, Are lost among my socks. I wonder […]
According to a Danish researcher, if you have blue eyes, you’re related to a common ancestor. He found that every blue-eyed person descended from one person whose genes mutated some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Before that, everyone had brown eyes. Geneticist Hans Eiberg says that blue eyes occur when the human default – brown […]
In April 2006, Bruce Springsteen released We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a collection of songs popularized by the folk artist Pete Seeger. My favorite song on the album is Erie Canal. Erie Canal is one of those songs that I, and a lot of kids, grew up singing. But, I never really listened to […]
The U.S. Census Bureau has released a new report analyzing the most common surnames. Smith remains on top, followed by Johnson, Williams, Brown and Jones. What’s interesting is that, for the first time, two Hispanic names have cracked the top 10. Garcia comes in at number 8, and Rodriguez at number 9. You can search […]
My great great grandparents, Nelson and Louisa, died in Florida around 1900 and are buried in a Waldo, Alachua County cemetery. A couple of the things I’m trying to accomplish with my family history research is to find out where my many grandparents are buried and to obtain a picture of their headstones. But, the […]
I am a direct descendant of William Bradford, a leader of the Pilgrim settlers, who crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620. He was Plymouth Colony’s longest serving governor. In learning more about him and his fellow settlers, I’ve come across many “facts” and stories about the Pilgrims that aren’t as accurate as we […]
A North Carolina mother gave birth to twins early Sunday morning on November 6th. Sounds pretty normal. But it happened right around the time Daylight Savings Time was ending. The first twin, Peter, was born at 1:32 a.m. Thirty four minutes later, Allison was born. But, because the clocks moved back an hour, Allison’s time […]
FamilySearch, the family history arm of the LDS Church is undertaking an ambitious project of digitizing their entire microfilmed collection of family history records. They have more than 2.3 million rolls of microfilm, which is equivalent to about 6 million 300-page books. These records are held in their Granite Mountain Record Vault, located twenty miles […]
