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GeneaNet : Community : Genealogy Blog Sunday May 11, 2008   

History

14 April 2008

Letters From The Battlefield

As we get older, our memories fade, eventually dissolving into smoky recollections, if we don’t preserve them in writing.

What price would you pay for a diary written by your great-great-great-grandmother or -grandfather? Imagine how priceless it would be.

Ancestors on my mother’s side, Sgt. George Davidson Bailey and his brother, Cpl. Council Walker Bailey, fought in the Civil War – on Oct. 19, 1864, at the Battle of Cedar Creek in Virginia. They, along with 11 other of my Bailey relatives, were part of the Confederate Army, Company H, 60th Infantry Regiment.

I have a book containing two letters written by my great-great-great-grandfather George to his mother from the battlefield. I have read the letters many times and wish he’d written more.

From his letters, I find he was a very strong-willed and principled man. He often wrote about honor and duty to his country, the beloved South!

In one letter, he told his mother that his brother Council was safe and asked her to please not worry. In another, he longed to return home to the farm and kiss his momma on the cheek. He wanted so much to plant crops and just sit on the porch.

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11 April 2008

China remembers nation's ancestor Huangdi on Tomb-sweeping Day

More than 8,000 Chinese from home and abroad gathered Friday morning at the tomb of Huangdi, the legendary Yellow Emperor who is considered the common ancestor of all Chinese.

The memorial ceremony started in Huangling County, Shaanxi Province at 9:50 a.m. That's an auspicious time because of the digits' association with the imperial line in ancient Chinese culture. The number nine is the biggest single-digit number, while five lies in the middle.

A drum was struck 34 times, once for each of China's 34 provinces, municipalities, autonomous regions and special administrative regions

The Yellow Emperor, a sovereign and cultural hero in Chinese mythology, is believed to have reigned from 2,697 BC to 2,598 BC. Although he was an actual ruler, his deeds have been embellished with time: for example, he has been credited with introducing the systems of government and law to human kind, civilizing the Earth, teaching people many skills and inventing all manner of items.

China has commemorated the Yellow Emperor since the Spring and Autumn Period around 8 BC.

"Kindred or family lines are especially honored in Chinese culture," said Zhang Jingkui, a former professor at Xiamen University who now lives in Hong Kong. "Each spring when smoke from joss sticks rises in Chinese communities around the world, it is a unique event."

9 April 2008

Feds Quietly Dig Up 67 Civil War Graves

Working in secret, federal archaeologists have dug up the remains of dozens of soldiers and children near a Civil War-era fort after an informant tipped them off about widespread grave-looting.

The exhumations, conducted from August to October, removed 67 skeletons from the parched desert soil around Fort Craig - 39 men, two women and 26 infants and children, according to two federal archaeologists who helped with the dig.

They also found scores of empty graves and determined 20 had been looted.

The government kept its exhumation of the unmarked cemetery near the historic New Mexico fort out of the public's eye for months to prevent more thefts.

The investigation began with a tip about an amateur historian who had displayed the mummified remains of a black soldier, draped in a Civil War-era uniform, in his house.

Read the full story

7 April 2008

Soldier's message in a bottle surfaces – 90 years later

When "Aunt Pete" wrote to her soldier nephew in France in 1918, she had no idea what she was starting.

The letter – almost perfectly preserved – gave a jaunty account of the mood in the midwest of the United States four months from the end of the First World War. But who was Aunt Pete? And who was her nephew soldier, Sgt Morres Vickers Liepman, of D Battery of the 130th Field Artillery?

It was known that Sgt Liepman survived the war but little else emerged from US government records.

Morres Liepman went on to serve as a Major in the US air force in the Second World War. He became a commercial artist and devised – among other things – the arrow that appears on all packets of Wrigley's chewing gum.

"Aunt Pete" was Sgt Liepman's mother's youngest sister, Luna Vickers, daughter of Congressman Andrew J Vickers of Kansas – part of family which traces its ancestry back to the American Revolution, the Mayflower and the Vickers engineering company in Sheffield. Aunt Luna's nickname was "Sweet Pete". By the time she wrote the letter, she was married to Robert M Scott, owner of a drugstore in Oklahoma City.

Cecil Liepman said the early part of the letter should not be seen as racist. The comments reflected attitudes at the time. Aunt Pete's family had, in fact, been anti-slavery and funded schools for black children.

Why did Sgt Liepman place his aunt's letter in a beer bottle and bury it? When found, the bottle was still equipped with its mechanical closing system. The tightly rolled up envelope and four pages were almost perfectly preserved.

Mr Liepman believes his grandfather buried the letter as a "time capsule". "He must have guessed it would be found one day and stand as a memorial of that terrible war," he said.

Letter transcription:

More......

28 March 2008

The Titanic historical treasure trove discovered in a shoe box after death of last living survivor

The moving story of one of the last survivors of the Titanic can be revealed for the first time after touching letters and documents were discovered after her death.

For 94 years Lillian Asplund refused to speak about the tragedy that claimed the lives of her father and three brothers.

Instead, the spinster kept the final moments of her family locked in her memory and the poignant possessions of her father Carl hidden in a shoebox in her bureau.

It was only after her death aged 99 the box was found along with the collection of Titanic-related items that, pieced together, tell the tragic story of the family's demise.

Among them were notes Mr Asplund had copied from a flyer promoting the benefits of living in California, an American dream that enticed the family to set sail for a new life.

An incredibly rare and water-stained ticket for the luxury liner was also found. Only a handful of Titanic tickets are in existance as most of them sunk with the ship.

The paper documents recovered from his body miraculously survived for 12 days after the disaster because Mr Asplund's lifejacket kept his coat's breast pocket out of the water.

His pocket watch which stopped at 19 minutes past two - the exact time the liner sank - was also found on him. And a heart-rending note written by his grief-stricken mother in which she wrote of how she hoped to see her son again in heaven formed part of the collection.

The stunning archive includes a sad photograph of Lillian, her mother Selma and three-year-old brother Felix, who both survived, at her father's grave in 1912.

26 March 2008

What the world will look like when we've gone

Welcome to Planet Earth: Population 0.

This is what our world would look like without people.

The images were created to illustrate what would happen if human life ceased tomorrow, if, for whatever reason, mankind was obliterated.

The question it raises is: how long would the remnants of our civilisation remain?

How much would we leave behind? What would an alien visitor learn about us upon landing on our planet a century or more after we had disappeared from it?

The answer, astonishingly, is: almost nothing.

Within a hundred years most traces of our modern-day lives would be so destroyed by weather, corrosion, earth tremors, surviving animals, insects and bacteria that the monuments and hieroglyphics of ancient civilisations would be better preserved than our buildings and our billions of books and electronic records.

An alien visiting Earth might well believe that the last civilisation on the planet were ancient Egyptians.

The prophetic forecast for the longevity of our 21st-century civilisation is contained in research for a History Channel documentary, Life After People.

And it's not guesswork. The two-hour special uses scientific expertise and understanding of history in order to predict the future.

Principal advisor on the TV programme is a 53-year-old Scot, Gordon Masterton, former president of the Royal Institution of Civil Engineers.

He says: "The lights will start going out around the world almost immediately. The last power will be produced by wind turbines but, after a few weeks, the planet will be plunged into a deep darkness it has not experienced since primitive Man huddled around camp fires."

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18 December 2007

Sotheby’s to auction Magna Carta

It’s freedom’s birth certificate.

And, if you have a spare $30 million, you could have the Magna Carta hanging from your kitchen wall.

The only surviving edition in private ownership is going under the hammer Dec. 18 in New York as the most important document Sotheby’s has ever sold.

“Absolutely, it is,” said David Redden, the auctionhouse’s vice chairman. “This is the beginning of liberty, democracy and freedom. If you went back in time to find out where it all began, this is it.”

The 2,500 Latin words, handwritten in 1297, long before the Boston Tea Party, are the closest thing Britain has to a written constitution.

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22 November 2007

Sanctuary of Rome’s “founder” revealed

Archaeologists on Tuesday unveiled an underground grotto believed to have been revered by ancient Romans as the place where a wolf nursed the city’s legendary founder Romulus and his twin brother Remus.

Decorated with seashells and colored marble, the vaulted sanctuary is buried 52 feet inside the Palatine hill, the palatial center of power in imperial Rome, the archaeologists said at a news conference.

In the past two years, experts have been probing the space with endoscopes and laser scanners, fearing that the fragile grotto, already partially caved-in, would not survive a full-scale dig, said Giorgio Croci, an engineer who worked on the site.

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14 November 2007

Barbara Dainton, the last but one survivor of the Titanic disaster has died

Barbara Joyce Dainton, who has died aged 96, was the last but one British survivor of the Titanic disaster. As Barbara West, and at just 10 months old, she was one of the youngest individuals to come through the sinking alive, but almost invariably refused to discuss it.

A mere babe in arms, Barbara, her pregnant 33-year-old mother and her elder sister were rescued and returned safely to England, but her father, Arthur West, aged 36, drowned along with some 1,520 other passengers and crew when the “unsinkable” White Star liner RMS Titanic, bound for New York on her maiden voyage, struck an iceberg shortly before midnight on April 14 1912.

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17 August 2007

Britney Spears’ Jamestown Ancestor and Katharine Hepburn

Following up on Britney Spears’ Jamestown ancestor Richard Pace, I just discovered that we would have been deprived of one of the most loved Hollywood icons if Richard had not done what he did.

According to the ancestral history already digitally mapped out in the Family Forest®, Richard Pace is one of the 11th great-grandfathers of Britney Spears.

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1 August 2007

Woman hunts for secrets of the lost colony

It has all the makings of a classic mystery.

A group of 115 English men, woman and children settled on Roanoke Island, N.C., in 1587, in one of the first attempts to colonize the New World. The group's leader went back to England for supplies, and when he returned three years later, he found no one.

"This is the greatest unsolved mystery in American history," said Roberta Estes, a Brighton Township woman and owner of DNA Explain, a private DNA-analysis company.

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14 June 2007

Oldest photo lab of the world

Recent discovery of the abandoned darkroom used by amateur French photographer Fortuné Joseph Petiot-Groffier whose preservation will be handled by The Niépce House.

This lab is the oldest existing we know of at present (thanks to the receipts, the chemicals can be dated back as far as 1840-41).

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12 June 2007

Confucius family tree goes international

For the first time in two millennial, the overseas descendants of the great ancient philosopher Confucius will be included in the sage's family tree.

More than 40,000 overseas descendants have been added to the Confucius Genealogy, which is now undergoing a fifth update and revision, said Kong Dewei, a Confucius descendant who is directing the updating work.

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