29 August 2015


DID YOUR GRANDFATHER or another MALE RELATIVE JOIN THE CCC's as a teenager in the 1930's (GREAT DEPRESSION ERA leading into World War II era) in order to learn skills and most importantly SEND MONEY HOME? 

Not just anyone could sign up.  This was a RELIEF PROGRAM (which I sure wish was still going on today) that existed from 1933 to 1942 in the US.  It was part of President Roosevelt's "New Deal" and a man had to be 18-23 years old (eventually they took men 17-28 years old) who were unmarried an unemployed.

image from PBS





CCC LEGAGY. ORG - RESEARCH  includes links to forms to send away to the right National Archives (Saint Louis) and information on CAMP LISTS.

So OK, the difficult has been (hopefully in the past) that men who joined the CCC's were sent to various camps, not necessarily close to home.  The goal was to SEND MONEY HOME and LEARN SKILLS.  The 1940 census might be of help to some of you, but don't count on it.  I've personally been unable to use a database to search that census for CCC members I'm looking for.  One of the reasons is that a typical participant stayed in the program for 6 months and could reenlist a total of 4 times for a 2 year stint.  This wasn't a branch of the military, but there was a sort of boot camp at first to see if a person was physically fit before they started doing a lot of hard physical labor, like building walls or planting trees to reforest a burned out area.  A person could be transferred around to where there were work projects.  Many men from poor families dropped out of high school to join or first did the CCC's and then enlisted in the military.  There were separate camps for veterans and Native Americans.

Today when you go to many parks, you will find stone walls and stairways that are still in use that CCC workers built.  (Such is the case in some of the Santa Monica Mountains here in Southern California.)

24 August 2015


The Princesses in this book are not all from Europe and they include the schemers, the insane, the plain unlucky.  It's enough to make you stop trying to prove a royal connection in your family history.

Really, you may count yourself lucky to have come from less inbred people!

Here's a link to Linda Rodriquez McRobbie's own review of her book! HUFF POST - 11 of the BADLY BEHAVING PRINCESSES - with Pics!

Small Quote!  "I took a look at the not-so-Disney lives of 30 princesses, and found a whole world of women whom history had mostly forgotten, vilified, or written off. These are women who took the crown and ran with it--though not always to particularly nice places. They lied, murdered, used sex, or dressed like a man to hold on to power, and weren't afraid to get a little blood on their hands. They're also women who were imprisoned, victims of circumstances entirely beyond their control, or who were forced to make difficult decisions that history still punishes them for. Some were mean, petty, and vain; some drank too much, or gave their affection rather more freely than their contemporaries thought appropriate. Some just wanted to have a good time, no matter how much that unsettled everyone else. And others, of course, were just bizarre and possibly mentally ill- a limited gene pool can be just as corrupting as absolute power. But at the end of the day, they're all real--and isn't that somehow more satisfying than the glittery, pink-and-purple fantasy princess?..."

at this site you can read a bit about Njinga, the Murderous Warrior Princess, Charlotte of Prussia, the Sex Party Princess, Princess Louise of Belgium, the “Insane” Princess, and Märtha Louise, the Princess Who Talks to Angels.


I picked this book up at the library because there are chapters devoted to Elizabeth Bathory (discussed on a recent post below) as well as one of my favorites, Princess TNT (Thun und Taxis), also known as the Punk Princess turned astute business woman.

OK, I confess that I read around European royalty a lot, have a fascination with tiny Monaco and the next generation there, and have no current claims to be related to any Kings or Queens, maybe just German and Hungarian, petty nobles... and as a citizen of the United States of America, my ancestors gave up on all that long ago.

I so enjoyed this book that it's one for my bookshelf meaning I'm going to buy it!

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05 August 2015


Have you ever had the experience of looking at a photograph and suddenly feeling a shiver go up your spine?  I have.  That shiver feels like a confirmation of truth somehow, and it certainly makes you pay attention to the photography.  What is it about a scene from another country or time and place that you recognize deeply?

I was researching one of my personal ancestral lines which, according to the marriage record I was looking at, went back to a German town in what was Hungary but is now Romania.  This was one of the towns which, while over hundreds of years was no doubt Hungarian, but the residents kept to German customs too, speaking both languages, building houses, wearing clothes, and keeping to customs that were more German.

So I wanted to see some pictures of this town and towns like it.

I went to a famous research institute, the Getty, and before I got there I ordered many books to be bought upstairs for me prior to my arrival.  Not known for genealogy, but for art, the Getty Research Institute still houses MANY books that can be very useful to researchers of family history and genealogy researchers as well as those learning about other cultures and societies for which the expression of creativity is one factor.  In this pile I found two books that were especially informative and interesting and that applied to my personal research.  These books were not available through my large city library or anywhere else I checked.

In one of them there were black and white pictures of this German town. I turned the page to  a simple street scene, and got the shiver up the spine.  None of the other pictures in the book did that to me.  I looked again.  There was something about that curve in the road.

It made me wonder if I was having a moment of ANCESTRAL MEMORY.

The theory of Ancestral Memory is that in our DNA/genes we have memories of things our ancestors have experienced.  In this case we are talking about a GGG.

This is different that Reincarnation Theories that suggest that we might incarnate in the same family, as a descendent of someone we were on earth years prior. 

With Ancestral Memory, all you have is GENETICS, your own body carrying information.  The theory has nothing to do with any spiritual belief.

Let's say that you were born and raised in the United States and identify as All American and really believe in justice and equality for everyone but you still find yourself fearing a certain ethnic group.  (I realize that admitting to such a thing may even be considered not politically correct, yet I hear people say they have such fears!)

My friend Marilyn, who only recently realized that she has German heritage in her ancestry on one side of the family, has since hearing of Germans in childhood, has always felt a little sick to her stomach at the mention of them.  She has never self identified as German and has self identified herself as Polish.  She had of course heard about World War II and the Holocaust, but she had no reason to believe that her own family heritage was any part of that.  Marilyn hated it when she learned she was genetically partly German, but she also felt there was no logic to it.  After some in depth research and interviewing family members and then reading around the history of the places they came from,  Marilyn learned that one of her ancestors had been taken from his house by German soldiers and had never been heard from again.  He was not Jewish.  This happened before World War II. When she got some photos of the town where this happened, she began to have a strong sense of having been there, of recognition.  Marilyn does not believe in reincarnation but she now believes that her fear is the fear of this ancestor.

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Ancestry Worship - Genealogy

21 July 2015


Access Newspaper Database and Newspaper Archive Academic , which are related, have me quite frustrated.  A researcher at a distance provided me some notes via text of two death/funeral/burial/obituary announcements and since I've used this database in the past to locate copies of originals, I thought I would try.

Since my experience has been that in many small town newspapers that were typeset there re a lot of misspellings of proper names, as if they had run out of one vowel and used another, I decided that the best tactic would be to go the exact newspaper and date and page that the other researcher had provided me.

I would have preferred to have rolled microfilm and read page by page.

I wasted over an hour trying to make the database simply get me to the paper on the date specified, if not the exact page, WITHOUT ALSO PUTTING IN THE NAME, first and last.

Finding the WRONG date, I read the language the paper used.  Maybe it was my terminology?

I tried obituary. I tried funeral.  I tried died.   Certainly something should come up!

Once again I returned the search choices, this time with a librarian at my side to double check my moves.

I think Access should make it easy to get to the newspaper, by date, for those of us who would prefer to read it page for page, rather than only focusing on what comes up in a search.

15 July 2015


I got to talking to a sweet lady the other day, while I was out walking my dog, who looks a lot like her dog.  The conversation went from dogs and fleas and itchy dog skin, to dog breeds, dog hair and dog shampoos, to human DNA, Blood Types, and genealogy. 

It turns out that this sweet lady has spend the last 6 months doing research on the Internet, kind of like a lot of people do when they first find the subject fascinating and want to know more about their families.  She has been looking at postings in genealogy groups, hoping to link up with relatives who know more than she does, who have maybe done years of research and are giving it away for free. 

With experience,  I feel I can say that this research is of the type that I find is usually a lot of time wasting speculations, and usually includes posts that possibly endanger the privacy of others in their attempt to be "helpful" because some people thoughtlessly post about people who, if asked, would say no to the post and even be infuriated that they or their family is being discussed or entered into databases without their knowledge and permission. 

It's not that I've never been there or not wasted time.

So after she gave me some free shampoo to try on my itchy dog, I gave her some strong advice on genealogical research.  I told her to start her own research, to document everything, to not take leaps without documentation because, one does not know that the information they find in groups is even correct;  I even met someone who did that and ended up spending TEN YEARS researching the wrong family.  Rarely are you going to find the actual documents posted to support the gossip. 

I told her about some records she can get for FREE without having to have a subscription to a genealogy database and where the local genealogical society has a club house.  I told her that if she ever intended to submit her research for inclusion in certain societies, someone else would be going over it looking for each item to be proofed so she may as well try for those professional standards even if she was just starting out.  And she listened.

But when she told me that she has B- (B Negative Blood) and had been reading on the net about how this blood type came from a breeding program begun by alien visitors to our planet, I knew this sweet lady had encountered some of the same groups and posts that anyone who begins reading around DNA and Blood Type does.

There is just a lot of hooey attached to B- negative blood on the Internet and other media.
Some of these include :

The "fact" that because human fetus have "tails" that proves we humans are "reptilian" and that the B- blood people have extra vertebrae and small tails on them.  (The truth is that many animal species that never develop tails look to have tails when they are only fetus and that this is simply a stage of development of the spine.  A tiny percentage of humans do have a more prominent tail bone or an extra vertebrae.)

The "fact" that people with B- blood are more often abducted by aliens, that aliens prefer them.  (Yummy!  Though I'm open to the idea that there is life on other planets that we would consider to be alien, and am even open to the idea that some people have had close encounters of the 3rd kind with alien beings,  I would love to know who took the abductee poll and how and when!)

The "fact" that people with B- blood are more psychic than other people with other blood types.  (I think all people have some capacity for having the 6th sense and that it might be innate like a talent or developed as a skill but there is simply no proof that type B- people, due to their blood type, are more psychic.)

"The "fact" that people with B- blood are EVIL and that the origins of this blood type come out of a place called the "Draconian" Caves.  (...as in Dracula - who by the way WAS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER...)

There are plenty of maps and charts showing the distribution of type B+ and B- blood all over the world which do, with changes in population, vary from year to year.  Granted some places such as Northern India - have higher rates, but overall B blood is rare and AB blood is even rarer.

The "fact" that people with B- blood also have higher IQ's that everyone else.  (Again, who, when, where, and how did someone take that poll? I know some people who would like to boast about it!)

The "fact" that humans in general were bred by aliens who ruled the earth, gods, or God, to be slave labor, in particular to mine gold, or that the female primates who were on earth at the time were inseminated for this purpose or the purpose of making man in the image and likeness of God...

(And if that is the case, so what?)

HERE ARE SOME FACTS CIRCA 2015 about B- blood that you can count on:

B blood is RARE blood.  B- blood is RARER than B+ blood.  In the United States, depending on which chart or map you look at, and because of who has and is immigrating here, the rate for B- is about 2-3% of the population but it might be higher or lower in your particular city or state.  Therefore most Blood Banks are always looking for B blood/plasma donors.

Scientists do not yet know how it is that blood types developed or mutated but they feel that a variation in blood types probably happened due to mutations and they sure do want to know so they are working on it.  The most prevalent blood type on earth is O as in Original Blood type and it is extremely prevalent.  DNA studies of migration may prove useful to figuring it all out.

It is possible that at one time the B blood type was far more prevalent but due to some disease that effects B blood type people more than other blood types more of those people could have died off.   It's true that some diseases seem to be more prevalent in certain blood types.

Type AB blood is even rarer and seems to have developed or mutated only a few thousand years ago. 

Science is clear that DNA mutates and that blood type is in our DNA.

B blood is sometimes called "The Asian blood type" but B- blood seems also be a Middle Eastern or Central Europe blood type.  B- blood is prevalent in Northern India while B+ blood is associated with some of China.

If you are looking to prove paternity in court, DNA tests today are far more accurate than previous Blood Type proof.

So to all you evil, psychic, genius UFO abductees with tails out there... sorry!

Negative blood is associated with "the Rhesus factor" as in the Rhesus monkey, another primate, but that doesn't mean that people with negative blood come from a long lineage of monkeys (and certainly not reptiles). 

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08 July 2015



Klansville USA is a documentary from PBS- American Experience series that is the history of the KKK.  It proposes that the KKK "tapped into the fears of low income Whites" and that it all took place in North Carolina in the 1960's.  Eventually there were over 10,000 known members in the southern states of the USA.
I found this documentary interesting, but frankly, I'm not so sure the KKK was about Whites of Low Income in the South so I'm challenging the premis.  To say this, I spent a couple hours reading articles on web sites affiliated with Neo-Nazism and White Pride and so on from the last few years.
I certainly do not support terrorist tactics such as burning crosses on people's lawns or discriminating on the basis of skin color or anything else when it comes to a person's value as a human being, place in society, and so on.  But the KKK was not just opposed to Black people (then called Negroes) but also Catholics, Jews, anyone not White Angle Saxon Protestant, and WASPS, as just about everyone knows, were the elite in the United States even before it was the United States.  I do not associate the KKK with just low income whites in the south, but I must say that there has been plenty of opposition to women having equal rights including education and work on the basis that this means that men will be displaced in the workplace.  The era of feminism I refer to began in the 1970's. And I truly wish sexism were as huge an issue as racism, especially when I meet sexist men "of color."
This video showed films that included female participation but didn't edge into the role of women in the KKK or their stand on feminist issues. 
In reading so very many DNA oriented sites, I think we are reaching a knowledge that it's difficult to find anyone who isn't "mixed" in some way, even if that means going back to the 12th century.
Instead of skin color, I think people are looking at the VALUES OF A PARTICULAR RACE or ETHNIC or RELIGIOUS group in which a person is self identified.  Is it wrong for a person to realize that their values are not those of another race, ethnic, or religious group and admit it?  I don't think so.
Additionally, I got to know a lot about the State of North Carolina through genealogy research for a particular family with deep roots in that state, including pre American Revolutionary members.  I had been told verbally that the family may have had Jewish roots in the old world.  There was no genealogical evidence of this in the states that I could find, yet the children in the family had been razzed by their neighbors who called them out as "Jews."  Interestingly,  I traced several branches of this family and found only one who owned a single slave.  I was told verbally that the family had been opposed to slavery way back. 

So the genealogy lesson here is, we cannot make assumptions about any particular family from North Carolina, even if the state was full of people who hated Blacks, Catholics, and Jews in the 1960's.

23 June 2015



As a genealogist, I have to look at documents and depend on them but I also have to know that sometimes documents are incorrect and can be incorrect for many reasons.  That includes census records that record the same person as White one year, Black ten years later, because that was the perception of one census taker or another. 

Birth certificates can be incorrect because they are often a recording of testimony.  Women can have identified the wrong man as the father on them.  (Such was the case with Marilyn Monroe, whose mother identified a husband she had just divorced as Marilyn's father, when it was another man.)

Although I know that some people are asked to provide their birth certificate for certain jobs or governmental benefits, I've always thought that a social security number is enough.  These days, and we have the Internet and Genealogy Databases that provide free personal information, including information on the living, for rampant privacy invasion.  It's as if nothing is left that is personal.  But if Rachel Dolezal had been asked to provide her birth certificate, as a documentation that she is Black,  if the NAACP required that she be Black to be employed by them, that would have been racist of them.  You do not have to BE Black genetically to do a good job advancing the cause of equality.

Rachel Dolezal, who has been working for the NAACP (National Association of the Advancement of COLORED PEOPLE) turns out to be White.  So says her parents, who also raised four of her siblings, adopted, who are visibly Black (or African American.)   Rachel SELF IDENTIFIES as Black.  She probably did as far back as she remembers her Black siblings but maybe it's more than that. Rachel is saying something about her INNER LIFE not her appearance, though yes she does like to wear hair styles that might be thought of as Black.

That is why she sought out the job she did.

Frankly, I think that if she's been doing a good job, that's all that should matter. If I were her  I would have told her not to resign. 

You see, lots of people self identify with the ONE ETHNICITY of many that they have rights to, the one that they feel the most comfortable with or are most proud of.  Many "Heinz Variety 57" people in the United States will declare their ethnicity to be that of their surname, even if they are now only 1/8th or 1/16th Scottish or Irish or whatever.  They may even have a tartan kilt, but be mostly Polish.

A person who carries a Hungarian surname but is mostly English and other than Hungarian is the actor Richard Gere.

I think Rachel Dolezal should take a DNA test that may locate some COLORED PEOPLE as ancestors.  I'm using this now outdated term because I happen to think the terms White and Black are oppositional, setting up conflict, and that we are all COLORED, but OK... some ancestors who tie her in with the African continent, in fairly recent history when it comes to genes, since we apparently ALL can trace back to Africa.

I also wish she, and everyone else, would read a book called ONE DROP by Bliss Broyard, which I read and reviewed for this blog some time ago.  In Bliss's case, her father, who passed as White, on his near deathbed, admitted he was Black and so then were his children, but actually, he wasn't 100% Black and neither was she.  Otherwise he wouldn't have been able to pass. The book is about Bliss' family history search and wrangle with how Black she is or isn't.  It only take ONE DROP of Black Blood (or Jewish Blood or whatever) for a person to be considered so, or so some people think.

But is DNA the point?  Not when it comes to SELF IDENTITY.

I had a friend who, while not saying she was BLACK, had one ancestor who was a Black and free woman, and who married an Irish servant when he was emancipated from his long service contract. Though blond haired, blue eyed, and as WHITE as one could appear, all these generations later, she also SELF IDENTIFIED with BLACK CULTURE.  She knew all about African art.  She loved Black men. She even said things that could be thought of as Anti-White racist. She had "one drop" of Black blood, and in her case, she so depended on it.

Likewise, I've had a friend who self identified as NATIVE AMERICAN, who didn't look it and had one grandfather who refused to talk about his heritage, which was suspected to be Native American.  She didn't have to prove anything to head up a local Native American interest group.  She felt tied to the world of the Native Americans.  I started her on a genealogy quest so that she could learn more about her heritage while circumventing her uncooperative grandfather.

Along with the DNA testing, I also think it's time for Rachel to do her genealogy, to be surprised by what she may find, as so may be her parents.

Finally, it's time for Rachel to be regressed hypnotically in search of this life and past life experiences that help her SELF IDENTIFY as BLACK.  I suspect that she has had a life in which she was a slave, if having four siblings who are visibility Black is not enough to be Black, or if meeting people in this life, or exposure to another culture than the one born into isn't enough.

Here is my point: How is this different than say, BRUCE JENNER, the male Olympic Athlete of fame who has been married to women three times, and fathered, SELF IDENTIFYING AS A WOMAN?  Despite his recent Vanity Fair cover, which was the result of some experts in hair, makeup, costuming, and photography, making him appear a woman, and despite any cosmetic procedures he may have had,  Bruce cannot change his DNA.  He is a man this life, but I'll bet that if he is hypnotically regressed, he will find that he has been a woman in many lives or in his most recent past life!

If we can accept (and the American public seems to have, wholeheartedly,) that Bruce Jenner is a WOMAN, we can accept that Rachel Dolezal is BLACK!

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13 June 2015


A nice lady named Elizabeth contacted me a while back hoping that I could be quoted, if there was some link, through genealogy or reincarnation, between two notorious figures of Old Central Europe, Vlad Tepes (otherwise known as Vlad the Impaler) who lived in Transylvania and was Romanian and a Prince and military leader, and Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian countess who was probably mentally ill, and who may have murdered dozens of beautiful young girls, in order to preserve her own youth or beauty. 

It seems that the Hollywood horror flick mythologies of Hungarians and Romanians as creepy people is taken for history and with all the media fascination, films and television shows that are occult based, about witches and vampires in recent years, I suppose there are a lot of people who feel familiar with and enjoy "the dark side" and want to explore "power."

The story of Elizabeth Bathory is associated with evil, with vampirism, and of power over the powerless, like a huge number of Slovak servant girls gone missing.  Were they so desperate for work that when their friends disappeared but they still went on interviews to the manor house?

No one should be worried about Elizabeth and inheriting mental illness, which I believe to be schizophrenia,  unless they can trace their genealogy and DNA back to her through their MATERNAL LINE.  Science has now proven that while sons inherit the gene for this mental illness, they cannot pass it on through their children.  It is passed from a mother to her children, meaning only Elizabeth's two daughters could pass it on.  Even then there is evidence that a person can have the gene for it and not develop it and further that about 20% of schizophrenics are spontaneously healed of the mental illness as they age.

It seems unbelievable to me that the locals didn't know something was amiss and put a stop to it before so very many young women were disappeared. Remember that there were so fewer people alive on earth back in those days, fewer people per square mile, fewer people to keep track of, less anonymity.  People lived off the land, agriculturally, and even if there was a manor house or castle or estate with a town around it everyone knew everyone because the main business of the estate was agricultural so in the villages they were seeing people they knew frequently, working with them every day, and gossiping about each other, keeping track of who married, who had babies, and who died. 

What is implied is that because Elizabeth Bathory was noble and came from a powerful family she could get away with anything, that no one, not even her husband or family, would put a stop to her behavior, and that they were all sociopaths if they didn't try to stop her because all this was simply not right.

I found this site that is interesting http://bathory.org/shyla.html   Anyone wishing to quote the owner of that site would need to get in contact with them.  And you would want them to provide their documentation for each statement.

If we look at this story from a genealogical POV, trying to prove it, we would need documentation recorded in reliable old books and ledgers.  I've yet to find any documentation of any murders that Elizabeth might have committed through anything close to a public or civil record, but according to this site, she recorded 612 deaths in her diary.  So let's go back to the reality of living in those days, the smaller population, the way everyone knew everyone, and consider that 612 girls lured to torture and death, is greatly over and beyond the numbers that some of our most notorious mass murderers have been able to get away with today.  Think about 612 girls in a relatively short period of time and in one place.  What did she do with the bodies?  Maybe her diary is full of her hallucinations and ravings?

Since such subjects are of fascination, I've met people who say that they think Elizabeth, a powerful lady, was the subject of slanderous accusations.

So many things about Elizabeth Bathory's life were ordinary.  She was from nobility and she married a noble.  She married, she had children, she was supposedly able to compartmentalize so well that she was considered a loving mother.  Who hasn't heard another woman being called a bitch or witch today?  . 

Was she "a witch"?  As for "witches," people should know that during the times these people lived in, the accusation of witchcraft could be used on any woman who was not understood, or any woman who had not married or had children, or who was considered ugly or deformed, or who was different, or simply not liked.  People were born into their class, their roles in this life and there wasn't a lot of tolerance for people who were different.  It was an era of superstition, not science.  When people accused other people of being witches, they were not talking the present day organization called Wicca, or nature worship, or the paganism of say, Native Americans.  Talk of evil and witches (and Satan) was almost always that of people who were Christians and Bible based. 

As for reincarnation,  this is where I'm really thrown. Is there someone claiming to be a reincarnation of either or both Vlad and Elizabeth out there?  Certainly I've never met anyone claiming so or heard of anyone claiming so. 

And let's wrap our minds around this further, Vlad may have chopped off the heads of those he killed in battle and put them on spikes, but he wasn't the only one.  This tactic was used by the Turks.  It was used in South East Asia in the 1960's and 1970's.  The same tactic of exhibiting the heads of those killed is being used by ISIS.   Terrifying.

Reincarnation has been accepted as a spiritual reality by Hindus, Buddhists, and many other religions throughout the world for a long time.  It was a matter of belief.  A sensibility.  These days, through the use of hypnotic regression, and through the testimonials of children who recall past lives, there seems to be more evidence for it.  Having a past life or lives and recalling it through these means, dreams, deja vu, and so on, is not associated with "the dark side,"  or evil.

That's not to say that people never remember horrible things happening to them while regressed.

I was in a classroom in which everyone was regressed and there was a couple there who believed themselves to be soul mates who, in the past life they shared, were both victims of a concentration camp during the WWII Holocaust.

10 June 2015


Today, because of the dependence on the keyboard, typing, and text, school children are not being taught CURSIVE WRITING... HANDWRITTING.

Oh you've read me complain about dealing with bad handwriting on documents and the poor way in which they are read and then typed into databases.  Much of my personal research STILL will not come up on databases and I've wasted so much time trying misspellings!   BUT TO NOT KNOW HOW TO HANDWRITE?

That is an educational disaster.

If your child is one who will not learn to handwrite in school - which usually began I believe in the first grade and used to be taught before or with printing - make it a summer project to teach them.

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25 May 2015


A few months back I attended a short introduction meeting to a well regarded pre-needs service that features no frills cremation.  Years ago when I first heard of cremation, along with first hearing about Hinduism and reincarnation, I thought it made sense as an option.   With the cost of funerals and burials outrageous (I was quoted $25,000 average to be buried in the same town my parents are - were - for much less) it is more the ONLY OPTION for many, including me.  As it turns out the cost of this pre-paid no frills cremation in a much larger more expensive city than that town is far less that $5000.  I had been quoted double that for cremation in the smaller town.

My feeling is that when my time comes nobody is going to travel to my funeral or to see a stone in a cemetery.  Wouldn't it be better to just have my urn (or in this case a wood memory box) shipped somewhere or better yet, to someone who will then spread my ashes?

But you know, as a genealogist, someone who checks into FIND A GRAVE as a resource, as well as tombstone projects, cemetery records, and burial records, to accept being so - so - disappeared - is a thought.

What I did not want was a burial at sea.  Romantic a notion it is I've spent little time on boats and generally expect to get sea sick.  I love the view of the ocean, but no, I would only want my ashes to be spread in view of the ocean, not in it. 

And really, I can imagine the memory box with my ashes in it, turning up at a Garage Sale, or stashed in a moldering basement, or, if you've seen the funny film, MEET THE PARENTS, sabotaged by a cat as a litter box.  (!)

To go back to the beginning of this story though, this recent inquiry of funeral costs started because I called a cemetery to find out if a burial record I had could be confirmed.  Was there a tombstone and what was the plot number should I come visit.  The cemetery asked me to send the death certificate that stated that the burial had taken place there.  They said there had been a flood but basically, they would look into it but could not identify the burial as is.  They even said that perhaps there had been an "illegal" burial which was that relatives would have buried the person in the middle of the night there... I doubted that, as  there was the county death certificate stating the name of the funeral home and the priest and the cemetery.

While I was on the phone, I asked what it might cost, if the grave was located and did not have a stone, to put a simple stone on it.  I was shocked when I was told the cost would be $10,000. 

Sorry but $10,000 is for a college education, a business start-up, a newer used car.  I personally wouldn't spend that much on a wedding.

Still, I thought that with dozens of descendants alive, maybe they would want to pitch in for the tombstone. 

There are so many forgotten people.  The woman who was buried, probably legally, whose grave was so poor as to never have had a stone, or perhaps that was washed away in a flood, died young and horribly, with young children in the house.  Today, dead since the 1920's, she is the great mother of two, the grandmother of two, the great grandmother of several...  Only her DNA survives.

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