Genealogy

When Christy Mirack didn’t show up to teach her sixth-grade class a few days before Christmas, her boss, Harry Goodman, immediately knew something was wrong.

Goodman, then the principal at Rohrerstown Elementary School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, hopped in his car and headed toward the young teacher’s apartment, hoping he would spot her changing a flat tire on the side of the road.

When he arrived at Mirack’s home on the morning of December 21, 1992, he discovered a gruesome scene: the 25-year-old teacher had been raped, beaten and strangled to death.

Police worked around the clock to unravel the mystery of Mirack’s violent death. But, for 26 years, the case remained unsolved, which only deepened the feelings of grief and loss among Mirack’s devoted family members, friends and colleagues.

“I never stopped thinking of Christy,” Goodman tells A&E True Crime.

Christy Mirack’s case was subject of an episode of A&E’s Cold Case Files on September 10, 2021. [Watch the episode here on A&E’s website and apps.]

After years of dead ends and disappointment, investigators got a break in the case when they learned about a novel, crime-solving DNA technique called genetic genealogy that was still in its infancy. The investigative technique uses family links in public genealogy databases to identify an unknown suspect.

In 2019, they used this cutting-edge tool to track down Mirack’s killer—a local DJ named Raymond Charles Rowe—and bring a small amount of peace to her family and friends.

The Christy Mirack Case Goes Cold

Though investigators eventually succeeded in prosecuting Mirack’s murderer, the journey to justice was a long and complicated one.

When Goodman found Mirack’s body on that cold December morning in 1992, she was wearing a coat and gloves, which led police to believe she had been getting ready for work. They found a wooden cutting board next to her body, which they believed someone had used to violently attack her. Those clues suggested the killer had been emotional and disorganized.

Police were also struck by the sheer brazenness of the crime, which had occurred during daylight hours within a roughly 45-minute window between when Mirack’s roommate left for work at 7…

Marlene Straus was 7 years old when her family fled Germany after Kristallnacht in early 1939. Like many who lived through that time, what memories she had were traumatic, and she didn’t speak of them with her children or grandchildren, including her son, Oakland Rabbi Andrew Straus.

But that all shifted about seven years ago when, out of the blue, Marlene received a letter from a retired German school teacher who had information on her family he found while researching the town where they had lived. He’d located her through the obituary of her father, Max Otto Roesberg.

A correspondence started between them, and Marlene asked if he could also find out what had happened to a close friend of her father’s and grandfather’s named Johann Trippen, someone they had spoken of with reverence.

The teacher, Josef Wisskirchen, of course said yes. His research led to stories about Trippen, who was not Jewish, hiding Marlene’s father and grandfather on Kristallnacht and smuggling food to other family members. She’d known Trippen was a friend, but  hadn’t known the full extent of his efforts to help her family.

Wisskirchen passed the word along. Not long after, Marlene received a letter from Trippen’s granddaughter Andrea in Rommerskirchen, and a new correspondence ensued.

The two families “have started this beautiful friendship,” said Andrew Straus, who is the Northwest regional director for J Street, as well as president of the Northern California Board of Rabbis.

On Jan. 25, he and his family watched remotely as Wisskirchen was honored at the Berlin parliament with the Obermayer Award, in recognition of his research on former Jewish residents in Rommerskirchen and the neighboring village of Stommeln.

The award was established by the late Boston Jewish philanthropist Dr. Arthur S. Obermayer to pay tribute to non-Jewish Germans who have made outstanding voluntary contributions to preserving the memory of Jewish communities in Germany.

Wisskirchen’s interest in the Jewish history of his region was sparked in part by meeting a Holocaust survivor who returned to visit his hometown. The meeting had a profound effect.

“Once I realized that victims of the Holocaust had once lived only a few hundred meters from where I live, it did not let me go. Especially childrens’ fates began to occupy me day and night,” Wisskirchen said.

Wisskirchen’s first book, “Jewish Families Fight for Survival,” is available in English and…

The Union County Genealogical Society’s latest edition of “Tracks and Traces” was recently published, and is available for sale at the Barton Library in El Dorado.

Issued since 1977, the biannual publication explores the history of Union County, the families who helped build the community at its founding and other notable people and events from the region.

The most recent edition includes the obituaries of local men and women who lived to their 90s or to be over 100 and passed away in the first half of the year; the first of a two-part history of the McWilliams family of Union County and their impact on the community; and a re-printing of a 1932 El Dorado Daily News article noting the 100-year history of Liberty Baptist Church, among other items.

“I find in reading those old newspapers and articles, it gives us a glimpse into the way life was back then, and then you can tie it into your search for people,” said Carolyn Smith, vice-president of the Genealogical Society.

Smith does most of the research for “Tracks and Traces,” but she said the Genealogical Society encourages those who have researched their own family history or who have an interesting historical story to tell submit their ideas for publication.

“We’re always looking for articles to publish and we wish people would submit pictures,” she said. “History and genealogy go hand in hand — you can’t have one without the other. Say you have an interesting family story, or pedigree charts are always good. If you have done research and have information on your family that you’d like to share, or even just stories that would tie family members together — anything dealing with genealogy and history.”

Smith said the Genealogy Society is currently working to build its collection of obituaries of people from El Dorado and Union County.

“You can learn so much from those obituaries. You can find maybe relatives you didn’t know existed,” she said.

Forty-five years worth of back issues of the publication are available for viewing and purchase at the Barton Library, Smith said. Members of the Genealogical Society will also have a booth at South Arkansas Community College’s annual Outdoor Expo, which is scheduled for Sept. 10, and back copies will be available there as well, she said.

Copies of “Tracks and Traces” make their way to far-flung corners of the country, and Smith said she’s had a few requests from outside Arkansas from other lay-genealogists for back issues as they work on building their own…

Forty years ago, a group of 25 enthusiastic, amateur genealogists formed the Carroll County Genealogical Society under the guidance of Janet Riley Colburn, a reference librarian at the Carroll County Public Library, and Margaret R. Price, a former high school history teacher. Although both founders are deceased, the society still enjoys a partnership with the Westminster Branch Library, where its extensive collection of genealogical and family history reference material is available for in-house use by the public.

Martha Makosky, director of the county library in 1981, recognized that genealogy and family history were becoming popular hobbies, and the library already housed important local history resources in its Davis Room. The library and the genealogical society, working together, would encourage more use of the library and help the new society grow. The first two genealogy publications, “A Guide to Genealogical Research in Carroll County,” and “Carroll County, Maryland Marriage Licenses, 1837-1899,” were underwritten by the library. Income from their sales enabled the society to begin publishing future books and a newsletter using its own financial resources.

As popular as Ancestry, FamilySearch, and FindAGrave are today for tracing your ancestors, they didn’t exist in 1981. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was not hosting a public television program called “Finding Your Roots.” DNA meant a great deal to biologists, but not to genealogists. Forty years ago, trying to locate your ancestors could mean endless correspondence with county courthouse clerks, church historians, visits to the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Maryland State Archives, or possibly sending a letter to a resource in Germany, Italy, or Ireland. It was a time-consuming effort to capture your family’s past … if you could.

Enter the age of personal computers. About 1990, genealogists began using computers to organize their family stories and family trees. Ancestry.com was launched in 1996, FindAGrave in 1998, and the wealth of genealogical information available online has grown exponentially ever since. The Carroll County Genealogical Society’s founding thus occurred at a critical moment in the popularity of this pastime. In all probability, the isolation required by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 has allowed more opportunity than usual for genealogists to search the internet looking for their family history.

The first issue of the society’s quarterly…

FRENCHVILLE, Maine — Armand and Lorraine Pelletier were stunned one December morning in 1985 when their Siberian Husky, Paca, dropped the frozen body of a newborn girl on the doorstep of their home in Frenchville, Maine.

For more than 36 years, Pelletier, his wife and the entire community were haunted by the death of “Baby Jane Doe,” who authorities discovered had been born in a nearby gravel pit and left to die, cold and alone. Who was the girl’s mother? Why was the baby abandoned?

Maine State Police officials announced Tuesday that they had answered at least one of those questions with the arrest of Lee Ann Daigle, 58, of Lowell, Massachusetts. According to cold case detectives, Daigle has been identified through DNA and genetic genealogy as the infant’s mother.

Daigle, whose name at the time was Lee Ann Guerette, would have been 21 years old when she gave birth. She was arrested without incident outside her home and quickly waived extradition to be brought back to Maine to face a murder charge.

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“Never, ever, ever did I dream even with DNA that they would find the mother,” Lorraine Pelletier told the Bangor Daily News. “It was so long ago.”

It was the morning of Dec. 7, 1985, when Paca took home the newborn’s body, to which the umbilical cord was still attached. According to police officials, the dog had carried and dragged the girl less than 700 feet to the Pelletiers’ home.

Armand Pelletier, who found the body outside his home around 10 a.m. that day, told police the girl had not been there two hours earlier.

“I couldn’t believe it at first,” Armand Pelletier told Portland’s CBS 13 in 1985. “At first I thought it was just a little doll.”

Watch CBS 13′s 2015 report on the case below.

Decades later, Pelletier would tell the news station details he recalled about the girl, including her “reddish blonde” hair.

“State Police detectives were able to track the dog’s path back to the location where the investigation showed Baby Jane Doe was born, and then abandoned, in below zero temperatures at a gravel pit,” authorities said in a news release.

A considerable amount of blood was found at a spot in the gravel pit, leading investigators to believe that’s where the girl…

TEL AVIV, Israel & LEHI, Utah, April 02, 2022–(BUSINESS WIRE)–MyHeritage, the leading global service for discovering your past and empowering your future, announced today the complete publication of an image-only collection of the full 1950 U.S. Census records, which can now be browsed free of charge. MyHeritage is the first company to achieve this with all metadata to make the images searchable (by state, county, city/town, and enumeration district), since the records were released earlier today by NARA (National Archives and Records Administration), 72 years after the enumeration was initiated.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220402005037/en/

(Graphic: Business Wire)

At 12:00 am on April 1st, 2022, the U.S. Census Bureau and National Archives released the images of the 1950 U.S. Census, precisely 72 years after enumerators began knocking on the doors of over 46 million American households, revealing important details about their place of residence, household occupants, occupations, age, birthplaces, and Immigration status.

The census provides fascinating details about the lives of the 150 million Americans living in the U.S. and its territories from 1940 to 1950. If you had family living in the United States during this time period you are likely to find important details about their lives.

“This is a momentous occasion for family history,” says Gilad Japhet, founder and CEO at MyHeritage. “The fact that this significant collection containing millions of images was made available on our site only 13 hours after receiving them, is a testament to the brilliance of the MyHeritage engineering team, providing value to consumers thirsty to search the 1950 census.”

The records form the first national census following the Second World War, the start of the Baby Boomers, and an increase in emigration from war-ravaged Europe to the U.S., making its publication of interest to many families outside the country. The decade that passed between 1940 and 1950 was one of the most eventful in human history. (See interesting information about the U.S. 1950 Census below.)

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To help people get started with census research, MyHeritage released the Census Helper™ – a new feature that tells you who in your family tree is likely to appear in the 1950 U.S. Census and in other censuses.

To learn more about the 1950 U.S. Census and all other censuses on MyHeritage, please visit the Census…

Genealogy products in California face new genetic data sale disclosures in a bill currently trying to be placed in a committee this week.

Assembly Bill 2222, authored by Assemblyman Brian Maienschein (D-San Diego), would make genealogy companies include a notice on everything from advertising to product packaging about how all data collected that isn’t linkable to another person can be sold to third parties.

The bill specifically targets companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com that require the use of a saliva DNA sample to be sent in.

If passed, all genealogy products and services would have to have the following text be placed large enough to see on all packaging and advertisements:

“Aggregate data that is not reasonably linkable to an individual person may be sold to third parties. [Name of genealogy company] is not subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Please consult our privacy policy.”

AB 2222 comes in the wake of rapidly changing California privacy policies and after an outcry from consumers after it was revealed in 2018 and 2019 that genealogy companies routinely sold genetic data to drug makers.

“A lot of people still don’t know this happens,” explained former genealogy company consultant Michael Harding. “It happens like this. You get one of those genealogy kits because you want to find out where your ancestors were from. To do that, you send in saliva and from there it’s sent off to a lab. They’re tested against ‘genetic markers’, which are little variations in our DNA. There it’s compared against all the markers based on various ethnic backgrounds.”

“It’s by no means accurate, and some results have been off enough that some companies have been accused of preying on people. But it gives a rough outline of where you’re from. And it also gives the company your genetic data for free, with the company free to sell it.”

“What this bill would do to the industry would be big. California is a big market, and having something that essentially says ‘we’re selling your genetic data’ would scare a lot of people away, or at least make them want to try another way.”

“The information sold to drug and personal care companies does actually help too. It’s being used to make drugs more accurate for different groups of people and to genetically find out where some conditions start.”

“The big problem was,…