Year: 2019

Christian Identity

Christian Identity

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The Christian Identity movement has its roots in British Israelism. Amazing. So does Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God. And so do some of the ersatz genealogies connecting medieval Europe to the Bible.

“The history of the Christian Identity movement reveals its startling foundations — which posit that both Christians and Jews are God’s chosen people.

“The acidly anti-Semitic religion driving much of today’s extreme right first gained a following as a Victorian curiosity, a benign British eccentricity propounded by the son of a radical Irish weaver. Born as British Israelism, the belief system now recreated as Christian Identity saw Jews as the long-lost brothers of Anglo-Saxons, the fellow elect of God.“

The short version of British Israelism is that some religious fundamentalists, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, developed the idea that the Anglo-Saxons (and other northern Europeans) are descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. That means they are God’s “Chosen People”.

There is no evidence, except wishful thinking.

More Information

Revised Nov. 3, 2019 to add link.

DNAPainter

DNAPainter

by Justin Durand

So. I was using Genome Mate. It was a lot of work for not much result. There was an update. Always more work. I never got around to doing it, and never went back.

So now I’m looking at DNAPainter. Worth taking a shot, or will it just be extra useless work?

Roberta Estes says, “DNAPainter is one of my favorite tools because DNAPainter, just as its name implies, facilitates users painting their matches’ segments on their various chromosomes. It’s genetic art and your ancestors provide the paint!

“People use DNAPainter in different ways for various purposes. I utilize DNAPainter to paint matches with whom I’ve identified a common ancestor and therefore know the historical ‘identity’ of the ancestors who contributed that segment.”

I wonder. Painting is fun, but I’m more just a genealogist. Cousins are fun, but they’re not the entire game. I’m going to always lose interest in any tool that doesn’t help identify new ancestors.

Holy Grail, Holy Fraud

Holy Grail, Holy Fraud

by Justin Durand

Honestly, nothing makiies me crazy quite like supposedly serious genealogists taking data straight from books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail and others of that ilk that should be just entertainment. I often think I should take on a systematic study and create a website devoted to the subject. Not going to happen, so I’m happy to find this article by Jason Colavito.

“The claim that the Knights Templar are the secret guardians of the Holy Grail, identified as the Holy Bloodline formed by the children of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, is of very recent vintage, but due to its promotion in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code (2003) and on TV shows like America Unearthed (2012-present), the idea, first proposed in 1982, has become an industry, gradually subsuming other medieval “mysteries” of equally dubious provenance, particularly the claim that a Scottish noble named Henry Sinclair discovered America in 1398. There is not one single authentic medieval document that (a) confirms a Holy Bloodline of Jesus, (b) links Henry Sinclair to the Knights Templar, or (c) documents any voyage by Henry Sinclair to anywhere outside of Europe. How the myth formed is an astonishing story on its own.“

Related Post

  • Swanstrom, Justin. “Holy Grail.” Swan Knight <yellacatranch.com>, Jan. 1, 2000. Retrieved Oct. 29, 2019.

Revised to update link.

Foreign Origins

Foreign Origins

by Justin Durand

Our European ancestors often did genealogy as propaganda. Nowadays it’s sometimes hard to convince new genealogists, people who might have only a limited historical education, that there wasn’t some secret, oral, underground stream of tradition that has been suppressed by clumsy academics.

No. It was pure propaganda, and today we can see through it easily.

When I was in college, we translated Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin class; a project that spanned a full year. I loved that story. I still do. Priam murdered at the altar. Aeneas and his family fleeing the burning city. This is the stuff of legend.

But it’s all just a propaganda. The legendary Trojan prince Aeneas, who fled the city, eventually settled in Italy. He was the supposed ancestor of Romulus and Remus, who founded Rome, and more importantly ancestor of the family of Julius Caesar. Virgil wrote his famous poem to help aggrandize Caesar and his family.

The story worked to connect upstart Rome to the ancient and considerably more sophisticated culture of Classical Greece.

And medieval propagandists took a page from Virgil. If Rome had a Trojan ancestor, then as heirs of Rome their national lineages had to be just as good. The Franks invented Francio. The British invented Brutus. The Scandinavians turned Thor into Tror. All Trojan princes. “Heirs to Troy, and by extension to the Roman Empire, they had a right to rule inherited from the heroes of classical antiquity.“

Preserve First, Scan Second

Preserve First, Scan Second

by Justin Durand

This blog post stopped me in my tracks. I’m doing a huge scanning project right now. Drawers and drawers and more drawers of old paper files. All my genealogical correspondence and papers from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. A lifetime of work, and omg I was active. And now I’m helping Mom clean out her storage units (yes, units, plural). She’s giving me boxes of stuff, some of it originals of copies she has given me, some of it copies I’ve given her, and some of it stuff I’ve never seen before.

So, you can imagine I was in no mood to hear someone say I should stop scanning, that I should, apparently, backtrack and start preserving. Might be good advice for someone, but not for me.

Then I took a few days to think. Maybe I’ve being over-reactive. INFJ. You have to know I’d be over-reactive to anything that challenges my organizational process.

On reflection, preservation first makes a lot of sense. You don’t have to fix all the problems, but at least get it organized, do some triage, and get it put in archival boxes. I have mine neatly organized into file folders, staples and paper clips mostly pulled, crumbling papers photocopied. So, I’ve already done most of what Denise recommends as the first step. The way I see it, I’m good to continue with the scanning.

I don’t have it all in archival boxes, and I’m not actually sure I want to do that. I have a bunch of lateral files, and a largish closet we call “the file room”. I use those for the papers. Then I have the photos in bankers boxes. I fret about those boxes. If I died right now, today, the lateral files would stay where they are are for 20 years, but the boxes would go to my sister, who would likely stash them in storage for lack of space.

My sense is that climate control is an important element here, as well as keeping a clear vision about what is practical and what is probable. I could put everything in archival boxes now, but my sense is doing that would increase the risk of eventual destruction.

Today’s thoughts aren’t my last word on the subject. Now that I’ve read about the problem, I’ll be thinking about it every morning when I go into the file room to grab today’s scanning project. And I might eventually change course. Just not today.