These are a few of the projects I started at Geni.com. Many of my Geni projects reflect the work I did many years ago in graduate school about fictional genealogy in the Middle Ages. Back then, my primary interest was in the chansons de geste, the Arthurian legends, and the Scandinavian sagas. Nowadays, my interest has broadened to include all forms of fictional genealogy, as well as ongoing...
I don’t have any known Gunn ancestry but I got interested in them a lifetime ago. Someone at the Family History Center in Salt Lake City suggested the Swanstroms, if they were originally Scottish, might have been Gunns. Actually, I think the idea was that the Swanstroms absolutely, positively had to be Gunns for a variety of reasons, but we won’t worry about that because they’re...
My sense from talking to our customers is that there is trend toward post-Christian America that is likely to be vaguely pagan, but not exactly pagan in the way my generation (Boomers) might think of it. “I’ve become interested in books and arguments that suggest that there actually is, or might be, a genuinely post-Christian future for America and that the term “paganism”...
We’ve seen this idea, now very common, that many Hispanos in the American Southwest have crypto-Jewish ancestry. The evidence for this exotic ancestry is weak. The story seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, and there is some reason to believe it might have its roots in the 19th and 20th century Seventh Day Adventists. A recent story in The Atlantic seems to go the other direction...
Having just finished writing about tomatoes, I couldn’t find a place to sneak a quick bit about cantaloupes. Talking to Mom yesterday, she was reminiscing about how much Daddy liked salt on everything. And he didn’t much like sugar because when he was growing up he drowned in sweets from his German mother. That’s why he didn’t let us have sugar on our tomatoes. Mom says...