Morgan-Knighton Kith 'n Kin

2008-01-28
From University of Copenhagen

New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.

What is the genetic mutation
"Originally, we all had brown eyes", said Professor Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. "But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a "switch", which literally "turned off" the ability to produce brown eyes"....

ProQuest & Google Partnership to Offer Millions of Newspaper Pages Online

ProQuest has formed a partnership with Google to digitize hundreds of millions of pages of local newspaper content for the open web. This should become a great resource for genealogists as many of these papers would never have been digitized without this program.

The old newspapers which are now digitized will be accessible by searching the Google News Archive or by using the timeline feature offered through Google News. Google’s overall goal is to make billions of newsprint pages accessible online.

The following announcement was written by ProQuest:

...

Yesterday evening a spammer hit the blog BIG TIME and flooded the comments with spam - nothing nasty - just irritating. I spent quite some time blocking about a dozen of the IP's that had undoubtedly been hijacked, deleting all the spam, and 69 emails (I'm notified by email of all entries to the blog) but I knew that was not really the solution.

So, temporarily, I turned off the ability to post comments to the blog. I apologize if this caused you any inconvenience. I didn't want to have to clean things up again while I was working on the solution. Hopefully, I've installed the right plugin to the blog's template so that the spam bots will be stopped in their tracks.

Thanks for your patience and support.

When I read this article in About.com this morning, I knew immediately I had to share it with the rest of you. It describes so well how doing the hard work of genealogy/family historian is rewarded by the exhilaration of discovering a new cousin, or a long sought after grave site, or a piece of memorabilia associated with a family story.

Kimbery Powell, the author of this piece issued this invitation:

... for most of us there is still a genealogy encounter that stands out - perhaps one of your early genealogy discoveries, an unusual "find," or a very special person

I seem to be in a "newsy mode" the past several days. Today I checked out the online Continuing Education genealogy course offerings at the University of South Florida. I was particularly interested in learning more about these courses because they are taught by a world renowned genealogist, George G. Morgan (don't know if he's related or not) via email.

From their website:

"In today’s mobile society, finding roots has become a very popular pastime. Award-winning genealogist George G. Morgan can help you identify your family’s heritage and help you understand more about those that came before you.

These online courses will be conducted via email, making them very accessible for all ages of people and stages of technology. These programs identify the fundamental pathways of primary research necessary for authentic lineage verification and you will learn not only who your ancestors are, but also how they functioned in their environment. Learn to meet and embrace your heritage."

Today, I thought I'd write up something about how this blog and other computer and internet technologies help me connect to my relatives around the world. You probably have similar experiences. I hope you will share them here.

First, this blog came about after I had already created two other related websites - morganvirtualreunion.com and a members-only website "News from our Branch of the Morgan Family" at myfamily.com. These three sites are linked to each other and starting to accomplish what I hoped for when I created them - a virtual gathering place for people related to me...

Federal prosecutors this week charged a Southern California woman with aggravated identity theft and other crimes for allegedly using a popular genealogy research website to locate people who had recently died, and then taking over their credit cards.

Tracy June Kirkland, 42, allegedly used Rootsweb.com to find the names, Social Security numbers and birth dates of people who, shall we say, had no further need for their consumer credit lines. She then "would randomly call various credit card companies to determine if the deceased individual had an … account," according to the 15-count indictment (.pdf) filed in federal court in Los Angeles Tuesday.

Read the rest of the story