Rootsweb is back up after 18 months in the toilet. I’m not cheering. The whole thing was mismanaged start to finish. It took them 18 months. Let that sink in. Rootsweb is one of the old guard of genealogy websites that host user-contributed data. When Ancestry bought Rootsweb in 2000 they promised to take good…
Author: Justin Durand
Cleve
Maybe I have too much time on my hands. One of the projects I was working on this week involved finding the ancestry of my dad’s best friend, Cleve Henry. One of my middle names — Cleve — is after this guy. He and my dad were cowboys together in the glory days of their…
Extinct Romans
This is a piece from Masaman about different ethnic groups in the old Roman Empire. Toward the end there is a brief bit about the Etruscans and Rhaetians in the Alps. Of interest to the Hauri DNA project because our G-L42 haplogroup seems to be concentrated in this region and probably originated there. Masaman, Extinct…
Brig. Gen. Solomon Place — A Biographical Sketch
Introduction Brigadier General Solomon Place (1770–1834) holds a distinct place in the history of early nineteenth-century upstate New York. A prosperous citizen of Greenwich and a career militia officer during the War of 1812, Solomon’s life is well documented through public records and a family Bible record penned in his own hand. Although family lore…
The Utah Accent (a.k.a. the Pioneer or Mormon Accent)
For Pioneer Day, let’s take a fun little tour of the Utah accent—also known as the Mormon or Pioneer accent. It’s its own thing, a bit different from the typical Midwest sound, and oddly overlooked by linguists. But if you know what to listen for, you’ll catch it all over Utah, southern Idaho, eastern Nevada,…