Every year, Cherokee youth take to their bikes to explore the tragic history of the Trail of Tears on a 950-mile ride.

When 20-year-old Kaylee Smith of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, stepped into the sacred water of the Blue Hole Spring at Red Clay State Historic Park in Tennessee, she felt the emotional tug of her ancestors like never before. As part of a tribal cycling team made up of Cherokee youth from Oklahoma and North Carolina, Smith was taking part in a bike journey from her tribe’s original homelands in Georgia and Tennessee through Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas to the capital of the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah to experience sites that are part of her history. The Blue Hole was a sacred place for the Cherokee before the U.S. government brutally relocated them from their homelands to a land they didn’t know.

“That was a place where the Cherokee went to the water for traditional and spiritual purposes,” Smith says. “My team and I were allowed to enter the water. That was probably my favorite part of the ride because I never really learned about the traditional experiences that a lot of my people went through.”

While the dip into the sacred water was enlightening for Smith and her touring team, other experiences along the cyclists’ Trail of Tears route were shocking and emotional for the history they evoked. More than 180 years ago, tens of thousands of Native Americans were forcibly removed from their homelands in the Southeast (and other parts of the country) and made to march on foot to Indian Territory, now the state of Oklahoma. The Removal tribulation began in 1830; the Cherokee Trail of Tears mainly spanned a period from August 1838 to March 1839, including a particularly horrific winter that final year.

A quarter of the Cherokee population died in the Removal.

You can read more about the 2022 "Remember the Removal Bike Ride" at: https://www.cowboysindians.com/2022/05/remember-the-removal-bike-ride/.

Many genealogy books are self-published. A news article today caught my eye: What You Should Know Before Self-Publishing a Book.

The article written by Lindsey Ellefson  and published in the Lifehacker web site answers frequently-asked questions about creating such a book. Save yourself some problems later by first reading the article at: https://lifehacker.com/what-you-should-know-before-self-publishing-a-book-1848885033.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. has inspired hundreds of celebrities and public figures throughout the years to explore their ancestry and make insightful revelations about their past.

However, Gates’ interest in ancestry didn’t start after he became a renowned scholar, professor, filmmaker, journalist and cultural critic. Instead, it began when he was a young child in West Virginia interviewing his parents about their family tree.

That interest grew throughout the years, eventually serving as the foundation for his hugely successful PBS show “Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” where he explores the ancestry of influential people from diverse backgrounds.

Gates discussed the origins of his show, his own interest in genealogy and family history research, and other topics during during “Past Connections That Bind Us All: A Conversation with Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” a Q&A event by Arizona PBS and ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication on Saturday, April 30 at ASU Gammage. The event was graciously sponsored by Arizona Gammage, SRP and ASU Library.

You can read the full article at: https://bit.ly/3KOgu8K.

Happy Star Wars Day!

Perhaps I should say, "May the Fourth Be With You."

Star Wars Day is a (very) informal commemorative day observed annually on May 4th to celebrate George Lucas's Star Wars media franchise. Observance of the day has spread quickly through media and grassroots celebrations since the franchise began in 1977.

The date of May 4th originated from the pun "May the Fourth be with you", a variant of the popular Star Wars catchphrase "May the Force be with you". Even though the holiday was not created or declared by Lucasfilm, many Star Wars fans across the world have chosen to celebrate the holiday. It has since been embraced by Lucasfilm and parent company Disney as an annual celebration of Star Wars.

The first recorded reference was the phrase being first used on May 4, 1979, the day Margaret Thatcher took the job as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. An online news article from the Danish public broadcaster says her political party, the Conservatives, placed a congratulatory advertisement in The London Evening News, saying "May the Fourth Be with You, Maggie. Congratulations."

Of course, that reference to May 4, 1979 has nothing to do with Star Wars. However, why let that stand in the way of a good promotion?

Perhaps a better reference is that on May 4th, 2015, astronauts in the International Space Station watched the Star Wars movie.

Whatever the reason, I would like to wish you and Yoda a Happy Star Wars Day!

By the way, the next day, May 5th is Cinco de Mayo in Mexico but is also known as "Revenge of the Fifth" day in a galaxy not so far away.

Buried deep inside an article about many different (and unrelated) things, there is this brief mention:

After more than a decade, the head of the National Archives and Records Administration retires. April 30 was David Ferreiro’s last day as archivist of the United States. He led NARA since being confirmed in late 2009 during President Barack Obama’s first term. During his 12 years in charge, Ferreiro oversaw a major shift from paper to electronic recordkeeping. Ferreiro also led the establishment of the Citizen Archivist program that allows volunteers to transcribe and tag records.

Deputy Archivist Debra Wall will serve as the acting archivist of the United States until the White House selects a permanent replacement.

You may be interested in an article by Maya Jasanoff and published in The New Yorker magazine. It describes the "history of genealogy." That is, how we got to where we are today. and how genealogy purposes have changed over the years Quoting from the article:

"You hardly meet an American who does not want to be connected a bit by his birth to the first settlers of the colonies, and, as for branches of the great families of England, America seemed to me totally covered by them,” Alexis de Tocqueville marvelled in 1840. It’s often said that genealogical research is the second most popular hobby in the United States, after gardening, and the second most popular search category online, after porn. Those claims should be sprinkled with a few grains of salt, but more than twenty-six million people have taken genetic ancestry tests since 2012, incidentally creating a database of huge value to pharmaceutical companies and law enforcement. The Silicon Valley-based testing company 23andMe, which formed a partnership with Airbnb to market “travel as unique as your DNA,” went public in June, 2021, with a valuation of $3.5 billion. The genealogical behemoth Ancestry, which boasts more than three million subscribers and the nation’s largest genetic database, was purchased for $4.7 billion in 2020."

The article also states:

"Our engagement with ancestry spans the spiritual, material, political, and biological realms, each of which has its own technologies and authorities. As a result, our laws, institutions, and imaginations are poorly prepared to deal with the contradictions that arise when one kind of evidence, like a DNA test, contradicts another, like a family story. Such tensions provide fertile ground for memoirs and magazine features, but the situation gets murkier when it comes to privacy, social justice, and national politics."

In years past, Maya Jasanoff claims that genealogy was an attempt to prove that one was in a "higher position" person than those of the masses. While true at one time, I would hope that is no longer true today. Instead Maya Jasanoff describes today's genealogy as requiring much more effort and complexity than I ever imagined. You can read the article at: https://bit.ly/3w2WN7Q.

On Monday, The Columbian’s digital archives became available to the public for the first time, allowing users to search with keywords and date ranges.

The archives, available at columbian.newspapers.com, open up a new world for historians, students and curious Clark County residents who may want to search for their own names, an ancestor’s name, addresses, or a date of a specific paper or an event.

“The digital newspaper archives are a really great resource,” said Donna Sinclair, history professor at Washington State University Vancouver. “They bring life to the past.”

The Columbian archives from 1890 to 2011 are available for $7.95 a month. The public can also access the archives on a computer at the Clark County Historical Museum, 1511 Main St., with a standard admission price of $5 for adults and $4 for seniors and students.

The Columbian’s digital archives are the first Clark County-specific online newspaper archives available after 1884 (The Vancouver Independent’s archives are at newspapers.com for the years 1875-1884). The archive may be found at: https://columbian.newspapers.com/.

You can read more at: https://bit.ly/3yaUd2v.

The next release of detailed data about U.S. residents from the 2020 census will be postponed until next year because the U.S. Census Bureau said Wednesday that it needs more time to crunch the numbers, including implementing a controversial method used to protect participants’ identities.

The delays leave government budget-makers, city planners and researchers in a lurch because the detailed data are used for planning future growth, locating schools or firehouses and research.

NOTE: Today's announcement has nothing to do with the release of residents' names, ages, addresses, and other personal information. By law, that information will not be released for 72 years (in 2092). Instead, today's announcement refers only to such items as American Housing Survey Table Creator, Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) Explorer, Census COVID-19 Data Hub, Census Flows Mapper, Data Equity Tools, and similar aggregate information.

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.

If you read my Plus Edition article last week, (+) Hands-On with My New DPN (available at: https://eogn.com/(*)-Plus-Edition-News-Articles/12759512), and if you are thinking of purchasing one of the units I described, I can now offer even more information about why you might want one immediately.

The remainder of this article is reserved for Plus Edition subscribers only. If you have a Plus Edition subscription, you may read the full article at: https://eogn.com/(*)-Plus-Edition-News-Articles/12765111.

If you are not yet a Plus Edition subscriber, you can learn more about such subscriptions and even upgrade to a Plus Edition subscription immediately at https://eogn.com/page-18077.

The following was written by the Genealogical Society of New Jersey: