• Uncle Sam isn’t just a character: During the War of 1812, Samuel Wilson of Troy, NY, provided the army with beef in barrels labeled U.S. The letters stood for United States, but people joked they referred to "Uncle Sam." The term came to mean the federal government; depictions of Uncle Sam appeared starting in 1852. In 1961, Congress officially saluted “Uncle Sam Wilson” as the “progenitor of America's national symbol."

• You can morph into Rosie the Riveter with rolled-up sleeves and a red handkerchief in your hair. The name was popularized in a 1942 song, but there wasn’t any one Rosie. The most famous image we associate with Rosie the Riveter, J. Howard Miller’s “We Can Do It!” poster, isn’t her. Miller created the poster for the Westinghouse Co.’s War Production Coordinating Committee, and it was posted at the Michigan plant for only two weeks in February, 1942. He didn’t intend for it to portray Rosie.

Read more on the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Memorial Park website.

• Most Viking costumes involve a horned helmet, but in reality, Viking helmets never had horns, according to the American Museum of Natural History. Instead, these Norse explorers and warriors wore conical leather hats as they raided the European coast from the late 8th to the early 11th century. Fun fact: Vikings were quite clean for the time—they bathed every Saturday. Get more Viking fact vs. fiction here.
  

• The witch of popular culture—black robe, pointy hat and warts a lá the Wicked Witch of the West—got her start in Shakespeare’s MacBeth and the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm. But those accused of witchcraft in the Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693 looked like anybody else. The series of trials resulted in the hangings of 14 women and five men. Another man was crushed to death under stones in an attempt to force him to enter a plea.

Learn more about the trials and see related historical documents in the Famous American Trials website.

• Vampire costumes are big this year, thanks to the book Twilight and the movie based on it. The name of late 19th-century novelist Bram Stoker’s fictional vampire, Dracula, was inspired by a real historical figure: Vlad III (aka Vlad the Impaler), Prince of Wallachia, born in Transylvania in the 15th century. His Romanian surname, Dracula, meant “son of the dragon;” Vlad’s father had joined the Order of the Dragon.

• Thanks to Treasure Island, Peter Pan, Pirates of the Caribbean and other popular depictions, pirate costumes sport colorful bandanas, jewelry, an eye patch, a stuffed parrot and maybe a hook or wooden stump. Your typical early 18th-century pirate dressed for the most part like sailors did. The parrot cliché probably arose because many pirates benefited from the trade in exotic animals; the eye patch and hook/stump because of the risky profession. See more theories in this pirate Q&A.
  

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 3:02:24 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1]

• We wrote about ethical wills (last statements concerning personal values rather than property) in the September 2008 Family Tree Magazine. (Family Tree Magazine Plus members can read the article here.)
  

Ready to get started on one? Personal historian Dan Curtis is offering a free, seven-part online course on writing an ethical will for your heirs.

• The 2010 Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, five days of family history classes happening Jan. 11 to 15, is taking registration. Learn more about the schedule, registration fees and course descriptions on the Utah Genealogical Association website.
  

• We don’t hear a lot of news about Chinese genealogy in the United States, but there’s an article about China's ancestral halls on the Wall Street Journal website. (Thanks to Tom Kemp of GenealogyBank for sharing this link.)

Discover more resources for Chinese genealogy in these Genealogy Insider posts.

• The new Amelia Earhart movie is getting tepid reviews (from what I’ve seen, anyway), but the real-life details of her 1937 disappearance might be more interesting. Ancestry.com’s "Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad" collection contains a case file of correspondence concerning an investigation into the theory that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were imprisoned in Saipan. Find out more about the case on Ancestry.com’s blog and on Ancestry.com's “What really happened to Amerlia Earhart?” page.
  

• Genetic genealogy company DNA Consultants has added a blog to its revamped website; posts review news and research on dna testing and popular genetics. That involves some complex scientific terms and concepts, so put on your genetic genealogist hat when you visit.

Friday, October 23, 2009 9:08:48 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

• The National Genealogical Society (NGS) has launched a blog called UpFront With NGS, which will complement the society’s monthly e-mail newsletter of the same name. News will be posted regularly on the blog, so you don’t have to wait for the e-mail, and you can leave comments on the blog posts.
  

• Ancestry.com is hosting a free webinar to demo its recently released Family Tree Maker 2010 genealogy software. The webinar is Sept. 30 at 8pm EDT. Learn more about the webinar and link to the registration on Ancestry.com’s blog.
  
  
• The McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College has a Web site companion to its special exhibit of the Becker Collection: Drawings of the Civil War Era. The drawings by Joseph Becker and others from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly depict the Civil War, construction of railroads, Chinese in the West, Indian wars, the Chicago fire and more. You can browse drawings by date, place, subject, artist or reference number.
  
  
• Irish-ancestored people, take note: As posted by Dick Eastman, all counties have been added to the National Archives of Ireland's 1911 census Web site. Later this year, you’ll start seeing 1901 census records. The 1901 and 1911 censuses are the only surviving full Irish censuses open for research. Read what’s special about Irish censuses on Dick’s blog.
  
  
• Last, I wanted to point out this fun post by Randy Seaver (a re-post of his earlier post, which I missed the first time around) with links to lists of funny/strange place names.
  

Friday, September 11, 2009 4:16:06 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

• Carol Clemens' family legend was that her great-grandfather Martin Franchetti was accidentally shot and killed by a stray bullet from a saloon brawl in 1902.

After finding references to seven newspaper articles within a couple of months, she discovered her ancestor was shot during an argument with a former boarder who’d developed a crush on Franchetti’s wife. Clemens says help from the Schenectady County Clerk’s office was invaluable in locating the perpetrator's criminal trial records.

• Cheri Adams couldn’t find anything about her the family of her great-great-grandmother’s second husband. A Google search brought up a New York Times article stating that the husband, Elijah Godfrey, was killed while handling dynamite in his cabin. Another article revealed that the medical examiner thought it was murder. “It seems Elijah had been speaking with authorities regarding stills in the area," writes Adams, "and undoubtedly due to his loose lips, the owners of the stills took revenge.”

• Tom Neel of the Ohio Genealogical Society found an account in a 1915 county history about John Gately, his fourth-great-grandfather from North Carolina. “Sometime after the year 1793,” Gately’s father-in-law, thinking the younger man had stolen his money, killed him.

Neel found corroboration in court records while at this year’s National Genealogical Society conference in Raleigh, NC. Turns out the aging father-in-law had misplaced his stash.

• Domenic Parenty, great-grandfather to Janice Gianotti-Zakis, was "gunned down in the street, defending a woman" in Chicago in 1894. In 2002, she confirmed the story in police records from microfiche at Northeastern Illinois University. Now, her ancestor’s case is chronicled on the site Homicide in Chicago: 1870-1930.
  

• Kathleen Anders wasn’t interested in genealogy when she found a tombstone in a Nebraska cemetery with the names of two young people who died on the same day. On a return trip, the caretaker furnished a file of newspaper clippings: Anders' great-grandfather had taken the lives of his brother and sister-in-law in 1903. Over the next two years, she found the trial transcript and interviewed people who remembered her family.
  

With the mystery solved, she’s turned to ancestors whose less sensational lives still deserve to be known. “I now focus on the other lines of the family that have, in their own right, great stories to be researched and written about.”

• Carol Heap’s grandfather Frederick Hirsch, a Nassau County, NY, police officer, was killed in the line of duty May 6, 1931, by a 19-year-old nicknamed "Two Gun Crowley." Crowley was convicted and sent to Sing Sing prison in New York, where he was executed in the electric chair in 1932. Hirsch's wife raised four young children alone; Heap remembers her father saying he really missed having a Dad.

• Connie Parott received a copy of a relative's 1970s school essay detailing her third-great grandfather's efforts to track down the murderer of his brother Thomas at a Sylamore, Ark., Christmas Eve dance in 1877.
  
  She found several news articles, “but to my amazement,” she writes, “the stories favored excessive details about the murderer, but nothing about the victim. The murderer had accidentally shot himself in the leg while hiding in the woods. His leg was amputated, so the newspapers had a field day describing a one-legged man hanging from the gallows.”

Friday, July 31, 2009 8:47:24 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

• Allen County Community Album: Images at this Allen County Public Library-hosted site portray people and places in Northeastern Indiana. The library’s well-known Genealogy Center also has an Our Military Heritage site with records and photos from researchers across the country.

• Arizona Memory Project: Collections come from the Catholic Diocese of Tucson, Arizona Jewish Historical Society, state archives, City of Glendale, Gila County and others.

• Documenting Arkansas: This site's content relates to the Civil War, 1927 Mississippi River flood and other events.

• Dominion Institute Memory Project: See 85-plus years of military history through first-hand accounts, photos and artifacts from veterans across Canada.

• Greater Cincinnati Memory Project: This site from my hometown shows you historical photos of schools, churches, homes, city scenes, people and special events.

• Maine Memory Network: More than 200 organizations have contributed materials to this site, which also supports similar projects for Maine communities such as Bath and Isleboro.

• Montana Memory Project: Cattle brand books, the Fergus County Heritage Book and Rocky Mountain College yearbooks are a few of the resources you'll find here.
  
  
• Terrace Park, Ohio, Building Survey: A local genealogist maintains this site on the history of buildings in an Ohio neighborhood. It has photos, deeds, census and land records, residents' names and more.
  

• The Valley of the Shadow: Censuses, church records, letters, diaries and newspaper articles detail life in two communities—Franklin County, Pa., in the North and Augusta County, Va., in the South—before, during and after the Civil War.

Thursday, July 23, 2009 1:57:45 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [6]

• July 18-19

• August 15-16

Thursday, July 09, 2009 7:01:30 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

• In 1777, in Bristol, RI, 13 gunshots were fired on July 4, once at morning and again at evening. Philadelphians rang bells, fired guns and lit candles.

• In 1778, Gen. George Washington gave his soldiers a double ration of rum on July 4 and ordered an artillery salute.

• In 1781, Massachusetts recognized July 4 as a state celebration.

• In 1785, Bristol held a Fourth of July parade—now the United States’ oldest continuous Independence Day celebration.

• In 1817, the Erie Canal broke ground in Rome, NY.

• In 1828, Charles Carroll broke ground on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

• In 1848, workers laid the cornerstone of the Washington Monument.

• In 1870, Congress made Independence Day an unpaid holiday for federal employees.
  

• In 1938, the Fourth became a paid federal holiday (three years later, Congress corrected the omission of Washington, DC, employees from this legislation).

• In 1973, the Boston Pops Orchestra began hosting an annual music and fireworks show alongside the Charles River.

Friday, July 03, 2009 3:48:16 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

At 84, Edward Skvarna is retired and living in Covina, Calif. But in 1943, he was fresh out of high school in a mill town near Pittsburgh, newly enlisted in the Army Air Forces and training in Kansas to be a right gunner on a B-29 when he met Ms. Reed at a U.S.O. canteen and asked her to dance.

“I had never danced with a celebrity before, so I felt delighted, privileged even, to meet her,” Mr. Skvarna recalled in a telephone interview this month. “But I really felt she was like a girl from back home. She was from a smaller community, and we were more or less the same age, so I felt she was the kind of person I could talk to.”

Sent to Asia, Mr. Skvarna kept up a sporadic correspondence with her as he flew reconnaissance missions. On May 7, 1945, based in the Marianas, he wrote of receiving a letter of hers that made him “jump with joy” and of a visit he made to a rajah’s palace in India; he also sent photographs of himself and asked for a snapshot of her in return.

“It’s amazing to me that she kept so many of those letters,” Mr. Skvarna said. “It tells you something about the caliber of person she was.”

Tuesday, May 26, 2009 10:32:51 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [2]