Historical, Media Coverage No comments yet

86 Generation Family Tree Enters Guinness Book

By on January 17th, 2006

The People’s Daily Online has news that an 86-generation family tree, that of the Confucius family, has been entered in the Guinness Book of World Records, 2005/2006. 2800 years, 86 generations.

No word on what kind of printer they used, or what genealogy program was used to track that far back (yes, some have definite limits). It would be a full-time job tracking such a tree by hand, for several individuals. I’d be curious to know the number of living descendants.

Twenty-five Chinese records went into the Guinness Book of World Records in 2005, sources with China’s submitting office said Monday.

“These new entries reflect China’s long history and rich culture, modern achievements in science and technology, as well as the lives of ordinary Chinese,” said Wu Xiaohong, a staff member with the Guinness submitting office of Liaoning Publishing Group, which is the only Guinness-authorized agency in China.

The Confucius family genealogy, one of the 25 records, is considered the longest of its kind in world records. Dating back 2,800 years, it clearly records the 86 generations of the Confucius family tree.

The Genealogue mentioned this as well.

Genealogy Rights, Hints & Tips, Media Coverage, News No comments yet

Family Ties Found at Last

By on January 14th, 2006

Kimberly Blair has written a touching story in the Pensacola News Journal (FL), about an 83 year old woman who was taken/illegally bought when she was a baby, and never knew her blood relatives until her daughter tracked them down 83 years later using a lot of patience and the internet.

Excerpt from the article:

Armed with a little information from family stories, Sharon Cummins ramped up those efforts just weeks ago while on a two-week Christmas break from her job at Pensacola Junior College….
*snip*
Whether it was luck, fate or super sleuthing, dots of information in her disjointed search began to connect.

“Terry Altstatt, my cousin, was the key uniting us,” Sharon Cummins said. Altstatt, the granddaughter of one of Maggie’s siblings, Oleta Walls, had listed the names of her family members on genebase.com, a site where she was documenting the genealogy of the Walls family that has roots in Missouri.

“What put it together for me is that I had these uncommon names, Oleta and her mother, Prudie, and I searched for those names on census records of all the area’s surrounding the orphanage my mother had been taken to,” Sharon Cummins said.

It’s a good article about a genealogist with a lot of patience and knowing what to look for (or rather what to look for that appears missing).

Family Sites, Hints & Tips, Historical, Structural Genealogy No comments yet

Saving My Family History and Remembering the Holocaust: The Tale of a Synagogue

By on January 14th, 2006

Political Cortex, normally a very political website (as evidenced by the name) has a very interesting genealogy story:

What follows is a very personal account of a non-political project I have been working on. It began as a quest I started some three years ago, delving into my genealogy and finally actually visiting the town in Latvia where one branch of my ancestry came from. What I found there was a Jewish population that had almost been wiped out by the Nazis and that may yet die out, fulfilling, in part, Hitler’s dream of eliminating Jews from Europe. There is one surviving synagogue in that town, though it is now a condemned building. That building has stood through 160 years of weddings and pogroms, hope and the Holocaust.

This is the story of my family’s roots in Latvia, my rediscovery of the synagogue where my great grandparents probably were married, and my ongoing attempts to save that synagogue.

Genealogy Rights, Hints & Tips, Historical, Media Coverage, News No comments yet

County Record Disposal Concerns Historian

By on January 13th, 2006

Yesterday I mentioned an article about some old records found in a high school and donated to a local history organization. In an ironic twist, the Reporter-Times (Martinsville, Indiana) has an article by Amy Hillenburg that is the exact opposite: County record disposal concerns historian. This is one of those areas where even though genealogists and historians (and archivists if we want to get technical) have all of these modern tools for preserving important documents, those documents can still be easily lost forever.

Excerpts from the article:

There could be growing gaps in Morgan County’s public records, according to county historian Sam Cline, if the proper process is not followed in storing, reviewing, microfilming and destroying them.

It concerns him that in 1969 and again in 2005, old record books were thrown into a dumpster for disposal and burning…..some of the tax records dumped recently were actually property of the Morgan County History and Genealogy Association. The fact that historians were not informed of the action makes him wonder what other valuable ledgers and record books are in jeopardy.

In the 1960s, Cline was doing research in the Morgan County Recorder’s office in the courthouse. Thelma Gray was Recorder at the time. She showed him a sight that still haunts him – a room on the third floor where people had merely opened the door and started throwing county records into it.

“I picked up a small book with a real leather cover and no information on the spine or cover and I opened it. The book was the original 1847 tax records for Morgan County,” Cline said.

Hints & Tips, Historical, News No comments yet

Why was loving Romeo taboo?

By on January 13th, 2006

Mary Penner has another helpful article in The Albuquerque Tribune, Why was loving Romeo taboo? about a problem that just about all genealogists encounter at some point in their genealogy research – name changes, name swaps, nicknames, you name it (pun intended, of course). In this case she talks about American Indian names.

Excerpt from the article:

Why was loving Romeo taboo? For Juliet, the problem seemed as simple as a name. She was a Capulet and Romeo was a Montague. Big deal.

“What’s in a name?” she cried from her balcony. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. . .”

Genealogists encounter maddening name problems all of the time. Our ancestors used first and middle names interchangeably, and occasionally people just willy-nilly changed their names. Nicknames were plentiful in the past, too.

The name issue is especially challenging when looking at Indian Census Rolls.