Genealogy Blog Family History

What about when family history threatens offspring?Posted by Administrator on September 30th, 2009

A recent story on MSNBC told of Patrick Tracey, whose family has a history of acute schizophrenia. The disease ultimately took his older sisters, his mother, and his grandmother. Unwilling to risk passing the disease onto his offspring, Tracey has decided not to have children of his own. This story raises an important question: in the face of irrefutable evidence that your family carries a deadly or harmful disease from one generation to another, would you forego passing on your genes?

Personally, I see my children as central to my life. It would be hard to imagine life and fulfillment without them. But, loving my children like I do, I don’t know if I would want them to suffer if I could help it.

What would you do? Would you go ahead and have children, hoping that either the ovarian lottery would pass them by or that your family would somehow cope with their disorder? Or would you decide the risk was too great?

Who’s responsible for values: parents, schools, or the president?Posted by Administrator on September 7th, 2009

Outrage over President Obama’s upcoming televised speech to the nation’s schoolchildren has ignited a storm of objections from parents. Obama says he just wants to give schoolkids a pep talk, tell them to stay in school. Parents claim the president is trying to subvert their authority and feed his own brand of socialist values to their kids. Schools have mostly OKed viewing of the speech in their classrooms, many of them leaving it up to the discretion of their teachers.

This isn’t the first time a president has directly addressed U.S. schoolchildren. Presidents Reagan and Bush, Sr. did it with no real controversy. Bill Clinton appeared on MTV to address the nation’s teenagers and to give his now-notorious "didn’t-inhale" remark. So what’s the big deal this time around? What has these parents in such a tizzy?

Obama’s race certainly has something to do with it-  a lot of people are still scared to death by a black man in the Oval Office-, but it’s not all. The profuse sensationalism surrounding Obama’s election is still fresh on conservatives’ minds- the president’s eloquence and star-appeal is frighteningly strong-, but that doesn’t fully explain it.

No, what has this group of parents so outraged over Obama’s school speech is his policies since taking the presidency. Some of these policies have been kept in the shadows. Some, like the current healthcare reform wildstorm with its accompanying town hall throwdowns and avalanches of lobbyists, have been very public, perhaps more public than lawmakers and the president would have wanted them to be. Add to these Obama’s cozy visits to Egypt and Saudi Arabia and his remarks on the Defense of Marriage Act and you have a very angry, wary conservative base. Even some moderate conservatives are now scared to death of Obama and his- real or imagined- socialist agenda.

So, when these parents no longer trust the President of the United States to deliver solid values, who, if anyone, is responsible for letting the president go ahead or not. Of course, this highlights a broader question: who is ultimately responsible for the instilling of values: parents, teachers, or the government? Out of patriotism or civic duty, should schools be able to override parents’ objections? Should the president be able to override parental objections?

This issue bleeds into all facets of education. We see it in evolution vs. intelligent design. We see it in sex ed. In fact, conservatives are currently in an uproar over the U.N.’s proposed sex education program which encourages contraceptives over abstinence and teaching kids about sex younger and in more detail.

At what point is the government not allowed to intrude on parental discretion? Up to what point is it okay if the president tells kids about school, sex education, or the definition of marriage? These questions get at the very heart of the delicate balance between government involvement and American autonomy.

WWII POW records go online, fill in the storyPosted by Administrator on September 4th, 2009

For family history buffs interested in more than birthdates and death dates, ancestry.co.uk now lists the records of over 100,000 British POWs captured during World War II, allowing genealogists to learn where their ancestors were held and any escape attempts.

Were your relatives involved in a real-life "Great Escape"? You can find out at this site, thanks to lists compiled by German authorities under the 1929 Geneva Convention. You can also find out if a relative died while a POW and how they died.

This is just the latest in a multitude of online tools that help family history buffs piece together who their ancestor’s were and what they lived through.