Genealogy Reviews Online

World Digital Library

Early this morning I found an article in the Washington Post about a new effort by the United Nations to create the World Digital Library.  I Tweeted about it, but it seems the Washington Post changed the link and my original Tweet link doesn't work.  I was a little skeptical at first because of the United Nations connection, then I discovered it was really run by various world libraries headed up by the Library of Congress.  I have nothing against the UN in principle - I just think it's a generally ineffective organization.

The Washington Post article discusses the history of the effort, who's involved, etc., I just want to show you some cool things I found:

A history of Genghis Khan written in 1722. 

Apocalypse of Saint John printed in Germany in 1470 (in Latin)

Emigrant's Map and Guide for Routes to North America created in 1853 (in German)

Video of a New York Police Parade created in 1899.

This library is full of maps, photos, manuscripts and has potential as a very good historical resource.  The best part is it's free.

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Biblical History and Archaeology

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Nothing inflames the passions of people more than discussions about religion or politics.  Since I tried to stir things up in my last post about politics, I might as well hit the other one and talk about religion.  I majored in history, those many years ago in college, and one of the most interesting classes I took was called "The Bible as History."  The intent of the course was to use the historical method to evaluate biblical stories in the context of what was happening in the world at the time.  The course itself was a bit controversial and there were a few students who questioned the content for faith reasons - although I could never figure out why they were in the course to begin with.  I found the subject fascinating and it's the one course I never cut while in college (I admit I did cut a few...well maybe more than a few).  

This class sparked an interest in me about the history behind events in the bible and I'm always on the lookout for resources with this theme.  I've listened to a bunch of lectures from The Teaching Company on the subject, and  there are actually quite a few programs on The History Channel too (in between Ice Road Truckers, Monster Quest and SandHogs).  One of the coolest sites on the Internet I found on this subject is a journal called Biblical Archaeology Review.  It's jammed packed with articles about history, the bible, and archaeology.  The best part is it's free...no subscriptions, registration or anything...just great articles.  You can subscribe to the print magazine, but everything on-line is free (there are no (+) articles).

Lets see, what other polarizing subjects can I write about?  

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Photo courtesy of freephoto.com

Panic of 1873 Eerily Similar to Today's Economic Problems

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I'm a regular reader of the American Historical Association blog, and every Thursday they have an article called What We're Reading.  This week they have an interesting link to an article in The Chronicle Review called The Real Great Depression.  The author says we shouldn't be comparing today's economic problems with the depression of 1929, but instead should look at the Panic of 1873.  He then goes into a good description of the 1873 problems and I think he's correct.  The Panic of 1873 contained elements similar to our current problems and the whole mess actually sounds quite scary, and almost sounds like what is going on today.

If you want further reading causing you to want to stuff your mattress with cash, look at the following links:

The Guilded Age:  The Panic of 1873 - Northern Illinois University 

The Panic of 1873 - The History Box

Panic of 1873 - Wikipedia

Our Financial Troubles; The Government and the Panic in America - New York Times, Nov 15, 1873

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Royal Cookbook - From 1390

I couldn't resist a post I found in a blog called Archaeology in Europe.  It seems most of my reading lately centers on archaeology and ancient/medieval history rather than genealogy, but in my mind it's all related.  This blog has many interesting articles and links and this one really caught my eye since I've developed an interest in cooking.  The blog article links to a story about the digitizing of a medieval cookbook put together by the cooks serving King Richard II in the late 1390s.  The article has a link to a couple of pages.  According to the article, this cookbook "is one of 40 literary treasures being made freely available on the internet for the first time by the University of Manchester's John Rylands University Library."  The scanned images will be available by the end of 2009.

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Gitmo By the Potomac During World War II

In a race against time, National Park Service historians are attempting to document the secret history of a World War II POW interrogation facility at Fort Hunt, Virginia.  Park service employees at Fort Hunt didn't really know the history of the installation until a tour visitor mentioned that a neighbor of his worked there as an interrogator.  This began the frantic process of tracking down the aging World War II veterans who worked at the facility.  This whole story is told in a three part series on the National Public Radio website (part 1, part 2, part 3).  This is a fascinating story still being developed, and is an execellent example of a situation where oral history is the only way of documenting the past.

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The 1918 Flu Pandemic

I was reading the Washington Post this morning and came across an article discussing a study showing that the blood of those who survived the 1918 flu pandemic were still producing antibodies 90 years later.  It's a very interesting article.  As I was reading, I remembered I had planned to write a post about this pandemic because I recently discovered my father's mother and older brother (Joseph Agazio) both got sick in 1918, but I just never really got around to writing it.

The only information I have on how the 1918 flu affected my family came in a story passed to me by my cousin.  Apparently both my grandmother and uncle had this flu, and unfortunately my uncle died after only a few months of life.  I'm not sure if my grandmother was sick while she was pregnant, or caught it afterwords, but she survived to have my father a couple of years later (fortunately for me).  All I know of my uncle is he was born sometime in 1918, died the same year, and is buried somewhere in Boulder County.  I find it curious I never heard anything about this story while growing up, and didn't even know I had an uncle named Joseph.  I'm going to be visiting my brother in Colorado for 3 days in September and I plan on trying to find and take photos of Joseph's grave.  I know the family was living in the town of Lafayette during the 1920 census while my grandfather worked as a coal miner, so this will be my starting point.

I found a few links to information on the 1918 flu pandemic (AKA Spanish Flu) you may find interesting:

The Great Pandemic - Department of Health and Human Services

Spanish Flu - Wikipedia

The 1918 Flu Epidemic - Gena's Genealogy (a fellow genea-blogger with interesting links on the subject)

Spanish Influenza Much Like Grippe - New York Times, September 22, 1918

New Influenza Cases Doubled - New York Times, September 28, 1918   

85,000 In Bay State Ill With Influenza - New York Times, September 30, 1918

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Romans Thinking Like Americans

I first saw this story in The Annotico Report and then the original article in the Telegraph.co.uk.  It's about the Roman municipal government looking for ways to boost a tourism industry apparently not doing as well as in the past.  This is crucial for the Italian economy because, according to Wikipedia, Italy is ranked as the 5th major destination in the world - in other words big time money is at stake.  So what is the Roman government thinking of doing to boost tourism?  Open up a theme park (Disneyland style is the term used) based on the glories of ancient Rome.  This is the perfect American way of problem solving.

I initially thought this was a horrible idea.  Aren't there wonders enough in Rome to attract tourists willing to spend money to help support the Italian economy?  The problem with my reaction is it's coming from a person who reads college history textbooks for pleasure, and one who is accumulating a small library on ancient Roman history/culture/ecomony/literature (I can hear people yawning when they read that last sentence). 

The Roman city government may be on to something.  Maybe a theme park could be the initial tourist magnet providing heavy foot traffic to all of the other historical destinations in Rome.  Think of it...a 3D chariot race ride could lead tourists to want to explore the real Circus Maximus, or a similar kind of gladiator ride could bring people into the real Colosseum.  The possibilities of theme park attractions based on ancient Rome are endless. 

Then there are the purists who think a theme park will cheapen Rome and it's history...maybe, but you know what?  If I took my 12 year old kids to Italy  right now for two weeks to explore it's history and culture they would moan and groan the whole time.  But if there was a cool amusement park to go to as well, the moans and groans would be softer, and the Italian economy would greatly benefit from an Agazio family visit.   

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Army Officer Lists

I had no idea I was going to write this post when I sat down this morning - it just sort of happened.  I started out reading an announcement on DefenseLink about a list of Army Colonels nominated for promotion to Brigadier General.  I was interested in this particular list because it contains people who were my peers at one time before I retired.  One Colonel on the list was slightly junior to me at one point in my career, but I eventually worked for him a couple of times along the way...it's a weird feeling seeing people I began service with 24 years ago now beginning to reach the senior ranks of the Army.

Since I was reminiscing about my Army career, I thought I'd try searching for my past promotion lists.  I remember finding one once, but had no luck this time.  I did, however, find many other historical promotion list and a few other interesting items I thought I'd share for the fun of it.  The moral to this story is if you had an ancestor who was an Army officer in the late 1800 up to around 1920 you may just find them on a promotion list published in a newspaper.  For my entire career, promotion lists were published monthly in the Army Times, but other papers, such as the New York Times, did something similar in the past.

447 Men Qualify as Army Officers - New York Times, November 18, 1916

Army Officers Nominated - New York Times, June 10, 1902

Miles is Made a Lieutenant General - New York Times, February 6, 1901

Sumner and Wood to be Major Generals - New York Times, July 18, 1903

West Point Makes 82 New Officers - New York Times, June 16, 1910

Oaths of Allegiance at Valley Forge, 1778 - Colonial Ancestors (This is an interesting site I've never seen before)

The 1910 Sailors' "Revolt Against the Lash":  The Military, Politics, the Body, and Rights in Brazil - This is not a list, but is a very interesting paper written by history PhD student Ann Schneider.  I found it on the University of Chicago website.

This was not a very focused effort on my part...kind of a stream of consciousness...but it was fun.

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Then and Now Photos in Washington DC

I found a really cool pair of photos on a blog called how now, brownpau? and have to share them.  The author of the blog lives in Washington DC, and when he and his wife were looking at the Library of Congress photos on Flickr, they decided to recreate one of them.  The blog shows two photos side by side in the exact same place and in similar poses - only they are 63 years apart.  I find this a facinating topic, and the blog author asks if anyone has any requests using Washington DC scenes from the Library of Congress.  What a creative idea...wished I thought of it!

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HMS Ontario - More of the Story

I'm probably the only one interested in this item, but I think this is one of the more exciting historical stories brought to light in a long time.  A couple of days ago I wrote about how the HMS Ontario was found.  In the various links included in the post, people in the articles said the ship was found in excellent condition.  I hadn't seen many photos at the time so it was hard to imagine what excellent condition actually meant.  Well, I found some photos on a site called Shipwreck World showing what excellent condition does mean.  These photos are incredible.  Here's another more detailed story from the same site.

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1780 HMS Ontario Shipwreck Found

A Revolutionary War shipwreck was found 500 feet below the surface of Lake Ontario recently as reported by the Toronto Star.  Apparently this was a rare find because the ship is still in good condition - it's called "the Holy Grail of Great Lakes wrecks."  According to the article, 120 people were on board, but only 6 bodies were ever found.  The intriguing part of the story was 30 of those people who died when the ship went down in a storm are thought to be American prisoners captured during the Revolution.  From the quick research I did after reading the story, there isn't a manifest listing those prisoners by name.  I wonder who these men were.  The story has a link to a map showing the route the ship was supposed to take.  According to another article from the BBC website, "the ship is now being treated as a war grave and there are no plans to raise it or remove any of its artifacts."

It's a shame we may never know who those 30 prisoners were.      

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American Civil War Research Database

Bloat...this is the best word to describe my Firefox bookmarks.  I have a tendency to bookmark just about everything interesting I find on the Internet.  I always intend to visit them later, but since I'm constantly finding new items of interest, these usually get forgotten because of the latest new site I find.  Cleaning out these bookmarks wasn't on my new years resolutions for genealogy, but I should have put it in there.  For the last few weeks I've been trying to reduce the bloat a little and in the process I've found a number of gems I wanted to revisit, but for some reason never did.

One of these gems is the American Civil War Research Database.  Probably the last time I visited this site was back in 2003 or 2004.  It was close to the beginning of my genealogy quest, but apparently I found no ancestors so I never thought to return.  When I did return the other day, I found a huge database with over 4 million individual Soldier records; over 4000 regimental rosters; 3500 regimental chronicles; over 1000 officer profiles; almost 18000 photos; and over 3000 battle synopses.  I was surprised this database grew so big.  The database status page has more detailed statistics if your interested. 

Unfortunately this is not one of those free databases one sometimes finds, but I think the cost involved is reasonable.  You can buy a year long subscription for $25 or you can buy a 7 day visitor's pass for $10, but you only get access to the soldier data and not the other features you'll find listed on the site.    

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World War I Casualty List - in 1918 New York Times

For the last 5 years we've seen the media announce battle deaths nearly every day.  Because of technology, all causalities are identified, families are quickly notified, and battle losses are released to the public in a matter of days.  But it wasn't always this way.  In this December 8, 1918 article, the New York Times announced a newly released causality list including 4826 more names.  Causalities include killed, wounded and missing Soldiers.

The striking aspect of this article is the war was over for almost a month at the time of this release, but the causality list is not even half way complete.  Just looking at the Army numbers, as of the date of this article, known deaths had reached a total of 47,739.  Wikipedia shows the total US military death count for the war at 116,708 - there were still 68,969 people to account for a month after the guns fell silent.  I can tell you some of those people were never accounted for because their physical bodies didn't exist anymore.  Another mind boggling aspect is we only participated in this war for a bit over a year. 

Can you imagine how many of those families felt waiting for the news of their loved ones that never came...

May 19, 1919 NYT Casualty List - Still not up to final total

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Rare Portrait of Elizabeth I Found in Private Collection

According to this BBC article, a rare portrait of Elizabeth I was found in a private collection.  Apparently, portraits of Elizibeth I before she was queen are rare and the current owner was not aware of how important this piece is.  This is an interesting painting because it shows Elizibeth with her brother Edward VI, her sister Mary I, her father King Henry VIII and also the Court Jester Will Somers.  I have to say, the children are a homely looking bunch.

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Another Civil War Causality

One hundred forty years ago Civil War Sailors, as part of a gun crew, loaded and armed a 9 inch 75 pound projectile into a cannon and fired it at a target.  They probably did this scores of times, but this one seemingly was a dud - it didn't explode.  I'm sure in the heat of battle this crew didn't even notice because they were concentrating on loading the next cannonball.  Flash forward 140 years and we find a Civil War relic hunter named Sam White trying to disarm it in his driveway when it explodes - killing him and destroying his property.

I know this is a tragedy for the man, his family and friends, but I started thinking about this Navy gun crew and wonder if, in their wildest imagination, they could ever conceive that a weapon they armed and fired in the 1860s would end up killing someone in February of 2008.  Should Sam White be counted as a Civil War causality?

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Poop Sells for $960

Not just any poop was sold for $960...this was historical poop - which makes it fodder for my blog.  The poop in question is now fossilized, thank goodness, and at 130 million years old I guess most of the smell is about gone.  It was bought by a man who owns a company specializing in doing things with dog and cat poop.  He said he bought this piece of history  "in hopes of motivating his employees...and using it as a marketing tool."  He went on to add "poop is a big business in the pet industry."  I would question employees who would be motivated by historical poop, but I guess someone has to do the job.

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Proceedings of the Old Bailey in London - 1674-1913

I first read about the release of these court proceedings here, but also read about it on another genealogy blog and decided to try it out.  I wanted to mine this site for interesting historical nuggets, but because of the massive amount of visitors I'm having a hard time getting through.  At first the site was unreachable, now I can get there and search but when I click on one of the results, the data won't show.  No complaining here - I'm just anxious to use it.  I'm not sure, but I think this is a one of a kind database.  I know I won't find any ancestors in it, but I'm intrigued by the almost 240 years of criminal proceedings where we will be able to see how the other half of the English lived. 

I intended to write about what I found searching, but can't until interest dies down.  Then I wanted to write about the Historical Background sections that has fascinating accounts of life in London, roles of men and women and the histories of various local communities in London, but the copyright section scared me away from providing links to these sections.  Instead I will just provide a link to the main Historical Background page and risk being hauled before Old Bailey myself.   

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The Hunt for Answers to the Raoul Wallenberg Mystery

During the Holocaust, Raoul Wallenberg risked his life over and over to save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazi death camps.  Just when his work was about complete, the Soviet Army arrested Wallenberg as a spy and he was never seen again.  According to this article, one of the new avenues of research are intelligence documents at the Central Intelligence Agency currently being reviewed for release.  Apparently, the CIA released documents in the 1990s indicating Wallenberg was a recruited asset, but there are other documents of a semi-private intelligence agency found in a Virginia barn that may shed some light on the mystery.  These documents are from an agency called "The Pond," and according to an article on the CIA website, are the private papers of the man who ran the organization, but unfortunately, since this was a semi-private and super secret agency, most of the records documenting it's operations were lost.  Scholars are also continuing to pursue newly opened Soviet records in an attempt to solve the mystery.

I think it would be nice to know what became of him and to know more about his motivations, but part of me doesn't want to know.  Right now Wallenberg is a larger than life heroic figure and, as these things usually go, information will eventually be uncovered that will expose him as a human being with all associated frailties and faults.         

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World War I Was in Color!

Did you know World War I was fought in color?  I never new this until a few minutes ago.  According to this website titled appropriately World War One Color Photos, it "contains hundreds of photos taken by the French in the last two years" of the war.  The fact they are in clear color makes them seem more real as opposed to those grainy black and whites I'm used to seeing.  There are some fascinating photos of destroyed buildings, soldiers, and this one of a field hospital is especially interesting.  Here's an Interesting one, and I don't think I need to describe it to you...I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself. 

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Re-Creating Thomas Jefferson's Library

Member discoveries at Footnote.com

Usually I blog about stories I read in the newspaper, but for this post I was reading the Library of Congress blog about the Thomas Jefferson Library and it pointed me to a Washington Post article on the same subject.  I've linked to both, but I think the blog post is the better article.  I think this is a great effort.  During the War of 1812, the British burned Washington DC, and with it a good portion of the Library of Congress.  Thomas Jefferson offered his collection for whatever price ($24,000) the government deemed proper to replace what was lost.  As things usually go for government records, there was a fire in 1851 destroying more than half of the collection.  These two articles are about the effort, over the last 10 years, to re-create the collection destroyed by the 1851 fire.  I love this effort and hope it's successful.

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