Celebrating Letters
Reasons to Celebrate
How did you ring in the new year? Are your family’s special traditions related to your ethnic background? Father Times describes New Year’s traditions around the world, from Armenia to Korea to Wales. For example, in Portugal you eat 12 grapes at midnight to ensure happiness each month of the new year. If you live in Denmark, finding a pile of broken dishes on your doorstep New Year’s Day signifies you have lots of friends.
www.fathertimes.net/traditions.htm
Dark Secrets
Maybe the underside of New Year’s Day is more your speed. If so, take a trek back in time to New Year’s Day via Urban Legends. You’ll learn about old superstitions that underlie the traditional New Year’s foods and activities—everything from black-eyed peas to kissing at midnight and making loud noise is included.
www.snopes.com/holidays/newyears/newyears.asp
Letters from Home
We all know how important letters from family and friends are to someone far from home. Learn how Civil War soldiers got their mail at “A Nation Divided,” an online exhibit of the National Postal Museum. And while you’re there, look at “Stories from the Gold Rush,” which not only describes the challenge to postal workers posed by Alaskan winters, but also offers portrayals of some of the exceptional women who joined the stampede to the Klondike for gold or other riches.
DNA Isn’t Everything
What are the odds that a DNA test will reveal complete and total ancestral answers for every family historian? A recent study using mitochondrial DNA of black Americans cautioned that inter-African migrations and cross-tribal marriages may make pinpointing a tribal line difficult. You can read the original research article, published in the British peer-reviewed journal BMC Biology online.
www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/4134
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