Many people of Irish ancestry love to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. on March 17. After all, it is a great way to celebrate one's Irish heritage. However, some of the celebrations are a bit questionable. In fact, many of the commonly-held beliefs about St. Patrick are wrong. Before making plans, you might want to consider a few facts:

St. Patrick wasn't Irish

Patrick was probably born in what is now England, Scotland or Wales around A.D. 390. Different historians have different beliefs about his date and place of birth. After all, the borders moved a bit over the years as well. Most agree that St. Patrick's parents were Roman citizens living in the British Isles. Therefore, Patrick himself was a Roman citizen even though he was born somewhere in what is now Great Britain.

At the age of 16 he was enslaved by Irish raiders who attacked his home. He was held in captivity in Ireland for six years. Patrick later fled to England, where he received religious instruction before returning to Ireland to serve as a missionary.

St. Patrick did not bring Christianity to Ireland

Christianity was introduced into Ireland by a bishop known as Palladius before Patrick began preaching in Ireland. However, St. Patrick apparently had more success at converting the Irish to Christianity than did Palladius.

St. Patrick did not banish snakes from the Emerald Isle

Legend has it that Patrick stood on an Irish hillside and delivered a sermon that drove the island’s serpents into the sea. While it’s true that the Emerald Isle is snake-free, it appears that had been true for thousands of years. Nobody has ever found even a fossil of a snake in Ireland. The assumption is that the waters surrounding the Irish isle are much too cold for cold-blooded snakes to survive the long swim.

Green historically is not associated with St. Patrick’s Day

The Irish countryside may be many shades of green, but knights in the Order of St. Patrick wore a color known as St. Patrick’s blue.

Green has been used by supporters of Irish independence who used the color to represent their cause in the 18th century and later. Indeed, green is often used to denote Ireland today but that has nothing to do with St. Patrick.

The Irish shamrock has THREE leaves, not four.

The original shamrock was used by St. Patrick to explain the Holy Trinity was probably hop clover (trifolium minus), white clover (trifolium repens), wood sorrel (oxalis acetosella) or the black medic (medicago lupulina). All of those plants have three leaves. The plant commonly sold nowadays as shamrock is usually trifolium minus, a small yellow-flowered clover with four leaves.

St. Patrick’s Day is not a time for festivities

Until the 1700s, St. Patrick’s Day was a Roman Catholic feast only observed in Ireland. The faithful spent the relatively somber occasion in quiet prayer at church or at home. The custom of revelry, wearing green and even of drinking green beer was first introduced by Irish immigrants and descendants living in the United States. The customs were later exported to Ireland and to many other counties. In the last few decades, Irish tourist boards have heavily publicized March 17 as a day for festivities.

Corned beef is not a classic St. Patrick’s Day dish nor even an Irish dish.

In Ireland, corned beef has always been a rarity. Instead, a type of bacon similar to ham is more common. According to Irish Cultures and Customs at http://irishcultureandcustoms.com/2Kitch/aCBeefCabge.html, “The truth is, that for many Irish people, Corned Beef is too ‘poor’ or plain to eat on a holiday: they’d sooner make something more festive.” Certainly, there will be many restaurants in Ireland that will be serving Corned Beef and Cabbage on March 17th , but most of them will be doing so just to please the tourists.

In the late 19th century, Irish immigrants in New York City’s Lower East Side supposedly substituted corned beef, which they bought from their Jewish neighbors, in order to save money. However, cabbage is certainly a common Irish ingredient in many meals.

The traditional St. Patrick's day parade is not traditional, at least not in Ireland.

The first documented St. Patrick's Day parade was held in New York City, not in Ireland. Eighteenth-century Irish soldiers fighting with the British in the U.S. Revolutionary War held the first St. Patrick's Day parades. Some soldiers, for example, marched through New York City in 1762 to reconnect with their Irish roots.

Other parades followed in the years and decades after, including well-known celebrations in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, primarily in flourishing Irish immigrant communities.

And then there is the green beer...

No, it isn't Irish either.

Genealogists have always been taught to record our sources of information. We not only record the name of the book or other source of genealogy information, but we also record the location of the building (repository) where we found it. Typically we record the building’s name, street address, city and state.

With today’s technology, shouldn’t we also be recording the geographic coordinates? With GPS receivers and the plethora of high-quality on-line maps, it is now easy to find the exact latitude and longitude of any address. Unlike street names, the longitude and latitude will never change.

I have written about finding cemeteries and other locations of genealogical interest by using GPS receivers. Shouldn’t we be recording the exact latitude and longitudes of those cemeteries into our genealogy databases? Perhaps the cemetery’s location alone isn’t enough. Should we record the exact location of the ancestor's tombstone.

How about the location of great-great-grandfather’s farm? I believe the latitude and longitude of that farm would be a valuable entry in your database so that future genealogists who have access to your data can find that farm’s location, even if it has since become covered with weeds or perhaps become a high-rise apartment building. In short, I think we should record the geographic coordinates of every location in our genealogy databases.

You can enter the latitude and longitude of any location as a text note into most any modern genealogy program. However, several of the better genealogy programs have specific database fields for these coordinates.

If you own a GPS receiver, the next time you visit an ancestral site of any sort, you should record its geographic coordinates into your database. You can also find similar information by consulting topographic maps.

It seems that several organizations have recently been formed to help preserve the history of Ukraine.

The following is a press release issued by History For Ukraine:

A host of famous faces have already pledged their support for the event, including Prof. Suzannah Lipscomb, Dr. Fern Riddell, Prof. Kate Williams, Dr. Janina Ramirez, and Earl Charles Spencer. They will be joined by professional historians and genealogists from around the world to stage a programme of informative talks and discussions on a huge variety of topics.

The event also has the support of a number of prominent organisations, including The National Archives, the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Genealogists, along with over 200 volunteers and local history groups.

History For Ukraine was the idea of genealogist Natalie Pithers, who describes the event as “a combination of Live Aid and Red Nose Day, but for history”. Natalie added: “The people of Ukraine can't afford for us to wait! They need this help right now, and this unique event provides the history community with an opportunity to come together and help in the best way they can.”

Attendees will be asked to make donations to the Disasters Emergency Committee Ukraine Appeal via a special JustGiving page. The event is provisionally scheduled to take place on Saturday 26th to Sunday 27th March 2022 (times and schedule to be finalised).

More information about the event will be available at https://historyforukraine.co/ and on Twitter @History4Ukraine.

The following is a press release issued by the newly-formed Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO):

URL: https://www.sucho.org/press-release-20220308-volunteers-unite

One week after launching the initiative Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO), co-organizers Quinn Dombrowski (Stanford University), Anna Kijas (Tufts University), and Sebastian Majstorovic (Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage) report that the project’s 1,000 volunteers from across the world have captured over 1,500 Ukrainian museum and library websites, digital exhibits, text corpora, and open access publications.

“We noticed that people had submitted major Ukrainian cultural heritage sites to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine immediately after the Russian invasion,” said Anna Kijas. “But many of those crawls only meaningfully captured the front page of the site – they were missing most of the digitized collections and multimedia holdings.”

SUCHO has been taking a multi-pronged approach to web capture: submitting more detailed manifests of URLs to the Wayback Machine to ensure better coverage, gathering data and files from major collections and adding them to an Internet Archive collection for easier discovery, and creating high-fidelity web archive files that can be “played back” in a browser as if they were a live site, using the open source software WebRecorder.net developed by Ilya Kreymer. “WebRecorder is the best web archiving tool I have ever seen,” said Sebastian Majstorovic. “By emulating a full browser that interacts with a website like a human user would, we have even been able to navigate complex 3D virtual tours and save them offline.” The web archives captured with WebRecorder also embed images, videos, and PDF files, and the data can be extracted and recovered in case these websites need to be reconstructed because their servers have been disconnected or destroyed by the Russian military.

SUCHO is not the only initiative archiving Ukrainian websites; Archive Team has also been capturing Ukrainian government sites, and other websites in the .ua namespace, at scale. SUCHO has been coordinating with Archive Team on particularly challenging sites, and has also received support from the Internet Archive’s Mark Graham. Focusing specifically on cultural heritage has allowed SUCHO to direct more attention towards quality control; a team of Ukrainian and Russian speakers reviews the web archives created by technically-oriented SUCHO volunteers for completeness. Other SUCHO volunteers have been enriching Wikidata with updated links to current websites of Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions, whenever the team discovers broken or malware-infected sites.

Even after the immediate emergency of website archiving has passed, the group sees a long road ahead involving data curation and offering support to Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions as they get back on their feet. “We aren’t looking to build up our own digital collections or treat this as a research project for scholars in North America and Europe,” said Quinn Dombrowski. “Nothing would make us happier than for these files to be unneeded. But just in case these backups will be needed, we want to be able to put the files back where they belong: into the hands of Ukrainian librarians, archivists and curators.”

For the coordinators and the volunteers, SUCHO has offered a better outlet than anxiously watching the news. For some, it’s also personal: “Wars can irreversibly destroy a culture’s most treasured artifacts and historical sources. When the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina was razed to the ground in 1992 during the Siege of Sarajevo, 90% of the holdings were destroyed despite the selfless actions of many brave inhabitants of Sarajevo. Librarians died and got permanently injured smuggling out the oldest manuscripts,” said Majstorovic. “That irretrievable loss of cultural heritage in my father’s home country has had a profound impact on me as a historian, and was at the back of my mind when I saw the pictures from Ukraine.”

SUCHO has been funded by emergency grants from the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH), and has received service credits and technical support from Amazon Web Services.

To get involved with SUCHO or learn more about the initiatives’s work, visit sucho.org.

I have written several articles about the "risks" involved in taking DNA tests when the results produce unexpected surprises.  A new story is making the rounds on the Internet that describes these risks perfectly.

If you would like to read about one family's "surprise," read the article at: https://news.amomama.com/287381-man-takes-ancestry-dna-test-out-of-bored.html

Another "DNA surprise" story, totally different in details, may be found at: https://www.inmaricopa.com/dna-discovery-quest-to-learn-more-about-family-led-one-woman-to-bombshell/.

The following is a press release issued by the Kentucky House of Representatives:

FRANKFORT, Ky. – The Kentucky House on Monday passed HB 502, also known as the Genetic Information Privacy Act.

The bill is meant to protect consumers who wish to send in their DNA for genetic testing to companies like ancestry.com and 23&Me. The legislation is sponsored by Republican Rep. Danny Bentley, of Russell.

“This bill is for the future. Many companies offer direct consumer testing through the internet, and it has become widely available. A person can order a kit, send in a cheek swab to the company, and receive a genome scan. It is usually not under a doctor’s supervision so there are no safeguards for Kentuckians. Information is easily obtainable by thefts, and with that information, a thief gains control of that person’s genetic information. People have a right to privacy when it comes to their genetic information, just like they have that right for their medical information, and this legislation puts those necessary safeguards in place,” said Rep. Bentley.

Rep. Bentley said the measure would do two things to ensure the safety of a person’s genetic information. It would regulate the collection, use, and disclosure of genetic data. It would also create a civil cause of action for violations of the prohibitions to be brought by the Attorney General.

The bill’s primary co-sponsor, Republican Rep. Steve Sheldon, of Bowling Green, added “It is extremely important that we regulate the collection of people’s genetic information because it could be harmful if that information is stolen or leaked. This is a growing private industry and we want to ensure that we are protecting the privacy of the citizens of the commonwealth”

The bill is now heads to the Senate for consideration.

The 2020 census continued a longstanding trend of undercounting Black people, Latinos and Native Americans, while overcounting people who identified as white and not Latino, according to estimates from a report the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday.

Latinos — with a net undercount rate of 4.99% — were left out of the 2020 census at more than three times the rate of a decade earlier.

Among Native Americans living on reservations (5.64%) and Black people (3.30%), the net undercount rates were numerically higher but not statistically different from the 2010 rates.

People who identified as white and not Latino were overcounted at a net rate of 1.64%, almost double the rate in 2010. Asian Americans were also overcounted (2.62%). The bureau said based on its estimates, it's unclear how well the 2020 tally counted Pacific Islanders.

You can read more in an article by Hansi Lo Wang and published in the NPR web site at: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/10/1083732104/2020-census-accuracy-undercount-overcount-data-quality. 

A few days ago, I wrote an article about what I believe is a great bargain. A $97 Chromebook is available at: https://eogn.com/page-18080/12651125.

Now something happened that is rare and very welcome. BestBuy dropped the price even further: it is now available for $89 (U.S.)

You can check it out at: https://bit.ly/3CtszO3.

Here is an announcement from the Lord Lyon Society:

The Lord Lyon Society was set up by the present Lord Lyon, Dr Joe Morrow CBE QC FRSE, to support the Court of the Lord Lyon and to further enliven the promotion of Scots Heraldry.

Our new venture

It is a new venture and its initial activities will be focussed in 2022 around the 350th Anniversary of the founding of the Public Register of All Arms and Bearings in Scotland.

The Society’s aim is to promote Scots heraldry, genealogy and the related arts, heritage and culture, and to continue to make the Court of the Lord Lyon relevant in our time.

You can read a (lot) more at: https://lordlyonsociety.org.uk/.

Randy hasn't been sitting idle. He has again updated his long list of tools of interest to genealogists. The following announcement was written by Randy Majors:

First, the popular Historical U.S. Counties Auto-Checker chrome extension has been updated to work with the latest version of Ancestry’s website.

Also, now when you use the Historical U.S. Counties map tool, you can explore the historical counties for any historical date in the context of civil townships. As you likely know, civil townships are often used in a lot of historical records from census to land ownership and more. Now, when you turn on labels for historical counties by checking the “Show historical county labels” box in the lower left corner of the map, if you also check the “Show present-day townships” box, as you zoom in you will see both historical county labels in brown and civil township labels in dark orange, as in the following screenshot:

Note that the civil townships are present-day boundaries, while the county boundaries are historical as of the date you choose at the top of the map. While not perfect, this works fairly well because civil township boundaries have changed much less often than county boundaries and so even present day townships can help you get better historical context of an area you are researching.

And finally, for monthly contributors, you can now add drawings on one map tool and then add the drawing to another map tool! For example, let’s say you draw your ancestor’s farm using the Section Township Range map tool, using the “Draw & Measure” button (which takes you to mapBuilder’s “Draw & measure on the map” module):

Now, once you save your drawing to your My Account page (you will be prompted to save after drawing on the map; just read the instructions that will appear at the top of the map while drawing), you can then go to another map tool and add your drawing to that map.

Let’s go back to the Historical U.S. Counties map tool for an example. Open mapBuilder below the map and choose your drawing from the right side of the “Draw & measure on the map” module:

When you click the “Show these Drawings on the map” button, you will then see your ancestor’s farm in the context of historical county boundaries, like this example that shows the property was in Cass County, Michigan Territory in 1830, but by 1831 it was in St. Joseph County!

I hope these enhancements help you with your research and mapping. And if you haven’t already, be sure and install the Historical U.S. Counties Auto-Checker for chrome and never let another ancestor fall off the map!

Happy mapping!