This story on NPR moved me to tears. What a wonderful illustration of the power of the stories we tell ourselves and one another. This woman chose to tell herself a different story than the one the world would expect her to tell, and in doing so, found healing and surprising joy out of the ashes of a tragic tale. Click to listen, but make sure you have the Kleenex box handy first.
21 May 2011
Forgiving Her Son's Killer: 'Not An Easy Thing' : NPR
Forgiving Her Son's Killer: 'Not An Easy Thing' : NPR
Alien planet? No, Icelandic night sky.
As if I didn't have enough reasons to want to visit the ancestral homeland of my Icelanders. (I am 1/8th Icelandic.) The land of fire and ice is full of wonders--and not only natural ones. They are also one of the world's best at preserving their genealogical records. That, coupled with a language that has remained largely unchanged for a millennium, and you have a genealogist's dream.
16 May 2011
Irish Connection
I'm very excited to find that I have an Irish connection! In all my 20 years of doing research on my family history, I had not come across it until now, and am surprised to find that it is not very far back: a 4th Great-Grandmother on my father's, father's side. I had simply never focused on that line before. Her name was Eliza Reed and she was born in Carlingford, County Louth, a coastal town in the northeast in 1804. In 1825, she married an English sailor, James Marchbanks, who was born in Plymouth, Devon. As he was a mariner (for a time, even a chief boatman in the coast guard), they traveled a lot. Their children were born in Hampshire, Essex, the Isle of Jersey, and Sussex, before they finally settled in London. Adding Irish completes my British Isles heritage, which also includes multiple lines of Scottish, Welsh, and of course, English. I'm proud to say that I am 1/64th Irish!
03 May 2011
World Memory Project
The World Member Project is a joint effort of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ancestry.com to create the world's largest online resource online for information about individual victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution. I'm honored to have played a small part in helping to making this happen, and grateful to efforts of my team and many other colleagues at Ancestry.com who contributed to the project. I hope that many people will participate in the project, and that as a result, many more will be able to find information about their loved ones.
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