Mexican Genealogy

March 11, 2023

Mount Airy is gearing up to honor one of the area’s most famous daughters. Donna Fargo is getting the mural treatment in downtown Mount Airy, with work tentatively scheduled to start in May.

To help cover costs, organizers are holding “A Bedazzling Hometown Fan Experience” featuring a fashion show and auction on Sunday, March 26 at the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History at 2 p.m. Due to heavy interest in the auction and high demand for tickets, organizers said they decided to add a second show at 4 p.m.

There will be Donna Fargo items in the show that many have never seen before. Ann Vaughn, one of the organizers, said the museum has several items and artifacts that have not been on display. Fargo is also sending items from her own collection to be displayed and some to be auctioned.

The event is a fundraiser to collect money for the mural by Triad artist JEKS which is going to be placed on the wall in the alley outside Walker’s Soda Fountain, at 175 N. Main Street in Mount Airy, facing the painted Coca-Cola ad on the opposite alley wall.

Tickets for the show are $20 per person and may be purchased at the museum, the Mount Airy Visitors Center, and F. Rees Ladies Upstairs. Donations for the mural are being accepted at the First Community Bank on Independence Boulevard, organizers said the tellers are aware of the collection.

Direct donations can also be sent to Donna Fargo…

DNA testing only reveals part of your story.

Climbing the limbs of your family tree or poking around at the trunk to find your roots has never been easier or, increasingly, without the risk of uncovering a family secret or two. With an accumulating trove of digital data available online and mail-in DNA testing services providing more details, family researchers have a boundless supply of sources for finding their branches and roots.

But DNA genetics testing only goes so far. The genetic code, fascinating as it is, doesn’t tell family stories.

“You never know what you’re going to find if you start looking. You’re going to find something interesting,” says professional genealogist Bill Eddleman, research coordinator at the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Cape Girardeau Research Center. “But you need the story behind it. And that’s what the paper trail does.”

In other words, nothing beats good old-fashioned research and detective work, whether that’s combing through the State Historical Society of Missouri research library at the Center for Missouri Studies at 605 Elm St. in downtown Columbia, which has the world’s largest collection of Missouri newspapers — some of which is digitized — or diving into extensive family histories and other documents via a mouse click. SHSMO has subscriptions to the nation’s top genealogy databases – ancestry.com, for instance — that are free for on-site public use.  

Whether someone is a genealogy…

Learn the history of the Du Bois Freedom Center in Great Barrington

Lenox— The Lenox Library presents the next installment of their Distinguished Lecture Series on Sunday, February 5 at 4 p.m. in the Sedgewick Reading Room. Historian Kendra Field will talk about the establishment of the new Du Bois Freedom Center in Great Barrington.

Kendra T. Field, Historian-in-Residence, is Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University. Her first book, “Growing Up with the Country” (2018), traced the migration of her Afro-Native ancestors after the Civil War. Her current book project, “The Stories We Tell,” is a history of African American genealogy from the Middle Passage to the present. Dr. Field abridged David Levering Lewis’ Pulitzer-prize winning “W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography” (2009). She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center. Dr. Field has advised and appeared in historical documentaries including Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,” “Roots: A History Revealed,” and “Tulsa Burning.”

This event is free and open to the public.

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Cabaret meets cumbia in “Broadway en Spanglish”

North Adams— Husband and wife duo Jaime Lozano and Florencia Cuenca…

HAPPY BLACK HISTORY MONTH

This month NPR honors and acknowledges the role of Black people in our history and their influence on our society and culture. Join us as we share playlists, stories, Tiny Desk concerts, conversations and other special events.

Follow along all month long while we celebrate the past, present and future, find updated NPR Black History Month stories here.

Happy Black History Month

Hassan Burke

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Hassan Burke

Happy Black History Month

Hassan Burke

LISTEN:

NPR Music

Black History Month Tiny Desk Lineup

Jackie Lay

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Jackie Lay

Black…

A Mexican airline’s January 2019 promotional campaign left observers (and some of our readers) wondering about the validity of an unusual discount it seemingly offered.

The advertisement, produced by Ogilvy, touted what it called a “DNA discount” incentive for travelers flying into the country via Aeroméxico. In a series of interviews, the airline sought to entice residents of the Texas town of Wharton, around 300 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, to visit Mexico through the use of genealogy testing — the greater the percentage of “Mexican DNA” each resident had, the ad boasted, the greater the discount they would receive on a flight to…

No need to look to supermarket tabloids for a dose of gossip about the royals.

How’s this for local royal trivia: New Mexico is loaded with people who can trace their lineage to European Emperor Charlemagne.

According to Henrietta Christmas, president of the New Mexico Genealogical Society, people in New Mexico who have the surname Vigil most likely have a common ancestor who is a descendant of Charlemagne.

That makes these New Mexicans descendants of the man who is credited with uniting most of Western and Central Europe under the Roman Catholic Church and who was himself declared the Holy Roman Emperor during the early Middle Ages by Pope Leo III.

The Genealogical Society announced the link last week.

While scouring the archives of Spain and Mexico to learn more about the Vigil family genealogy, researchers came across information indicating that one of those ancestors was a descendant of Charlemagne, said Jose Antonio Esquibel, one of the New Mexico genealogical researchers.

“The research, which began in the 1950s, was continued in

to the 1990s by several researchers, including myself, in order to extend the genealogy of the…

Ontario resident Carlie McMaster says she submitted her DNA to Ancestry.com in 2019 to discover more about her father’s side of the family following his passing.

The 28-year-old Brantford, Ont., resident said she just wanted to learn about her family’s health history, when she made the discovery that would change her life.

The website matched her genetic information to a woman in Minnesota named Rylee Hall, and they began to chat about how they might be related.

“I didn’t really talk too much when Rylee first reached out because I just didn’t really know. I just kind of questioned everything … It was a shock thing,” McMaster told CTV News Toronto on Monday.

“I think it was four months later that I finally reached out again over Instagram and said let’s maybe try to do some digging and figure it out.”

At this point, she said, she and Hall were speaking frequently and discovering unique similarities – their mannerisms, the distinctive blue ring around their hazel eyes, and their musical background.

Carlie McMaster, shown in a childhood photo, says she discovered she was conceived through a sperm donation after submitting her DNA to Ancestry.com.

They eventually learned the similarities were no coincidence as McMaster and Hall shared a biological father and both were conceived through a sperm donation.

“I was shocked at first. I think it was a lot of questioning my identity but also being really excited to have this connection at the…

The near-perfect case of dimensionality reduction

Applying principal component analysis (PCA) to a dataset of four populations sampled evenly: the three primary colors (Red, Green, and Blue) and Black illustrate a near-ideal dimension reduction example. PCA condensed the dataset of these four samples from a 3D Euclidean space (Fig. 1B) into three principal components (PCs), the first two of which explained 88% of the variation and can be visualized in a 2D scatterplot (Fig. 1C). Here, and in all other color-based analyses, the colors represent the true 3D structure, whereas their positions on the 2D plots are the outcome of PCA. Although PCA correctly positioned the primary colors at even distances from each other and Black, it distorted the distances between the primary colors and Black (from 1 in 3D space to 0.82 in 2D space). Thereby, even in this limited and near-perfect demonstration of data reduction, the observed distances do not reflect the actual distances between the samples (which are impossible to recreate in a 2D dataset). In other words, distances between samples in a reduced dimensionality plot do not and cannot be expected to represent actual genetic distances. Evenly increasing all the sample sizes yields identical results irrespective of the sample size (Fig. 1D,E).

When analyzing human populations, which harbor most of the genomic variation between continental populations (12%) with only 1% of the genetic variation distributed within continental…

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in the process of checking the boxes on all the steps one takes before running for president.

Trips to early primary states? Check

Endorsements to build support among the rank and file? Check

Television appearances? Check

Working on his physical appearance? Check

And then there’s his latest item crossed off the list — publishing a book.

These types of books usually have two goals — to lay out the general political philosophy of the potential candidate and to drum up publicity.

Pompeo’s book has certainly drummed up publicity. Aside from winning him appearances on major television networks, it drew criticism from a number of news outlets — particularly for his portrayal of Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was likely complicit in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, according to U.S. intelligence.

In its review of the book, the Washington Post called Pompeo a “mean son of a bitch.” Its editorial about Pompeo accused him of not respecting free speech. On top of that, Mexican Foreign Affairs Minister Marcelo Ebrard wrote a letter criticizing Pompeo’s book and saying it’s part of an “anti-Mexican campaign.”

Pompeo desperately needs attention if he decides to jump into the Republican primary. While former President Donald Trump, Pompeo’s former boss, is the only major Republican who has officially announced a campaign, in very early polling, Pompeo is averaging around 1% of the vote….

The St. Johns County Council on Aging has released its schedule of classes and events for February 2023. COA offers activities, services, programs and opportunities for all ages.

The main site is at 180 Marine St. in St. Augustine, but there are other community centers. For information or details, go to coasjc.org call 904-209-3700.

COA’s RIVER HOUSE, 179 Marine St., St. Augustine

Classes are four to seven weeks long and begin the first week of February. For questions, call 904-209-3655 or email [email protected]. For information, go to www.coasjc.org/river-house.

REGISTRATION REQUIRED: Registration is required for the following programs, and space is limited.  To review course details and to register, go to https://coasjc.coursestorm.com/category/river-house.

Watercolor 1 Class: Four weeks starting at 9 a.m. Feb. 1.

Ukulele Level 2 for Beginners: Four weeks starting at 9:45 a.m. Feb. 1.

Chair Yoga: Four weeks starting at 10:30 a.m. Feb. 1.

Blues Guitar: Four weeks starting at 11:30 a.m. Feb. 1.

Beginning Acrylic Landscape Painting: Four weeks starting at 11:30 a.m. Feb. 1.