Alabama
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
I had constructed a scenario in my head whereby Monroe Bryant of Rockport, Texas, petty criminal and draft delinquent, had gone to Louisiana and acquired another man’s draft registration card. I based this scenario on the fact that in the same batch of FBI reports that I had received concerning my great uncle Monroe Bryant of Rockport, there was another …
August 8, 2012 Wednesday at 7:59 pm
A Second Monroe Bryant Potentially Opens A Nasty Door
Second of three parts When last we met we learned from Monroe Bryant how not to volunteer for military service. Around the same time that Monroe Bryant had stolen money from the Navy recruiting office in Corpus Christi, Texas, the FBI (then known as the Bureau of Investigation) conducted a sweep of so-called “draft delinquents” in San Antonio. Among the …
July 29, 2012 Sunday at 9:00 pm
Getting Back to Some Hard Genealogy
It took a near-disaster in the form of a hard disk failure to bring me back to doing some basic genealogy. I took me a week to recover and reassemble my files, which had been backed up onto three different systems. The redundancy was a fortunate thing born out of some lethargy in organization. As a fortuitous happenstance, I lost …
October 5, 2011 Wednesday at 5:26 pm
Halloween Census Whacking
With the crisis of my father’s recent illness and the minor drama of my own, I feel like I’ve been way out of touch the last two weeks. It’s time get back into the flow of things. I thought little census whacking for Halloween would ease my way back into writing. So I went hunting for Vampires, Zombies, Ghosts, …
October 31, 2009 Saturday at 6:24 pm
"Open" State Vital Records: The Bad and the Ugly
One of Several Posts about Open Government Laws and Genealogy Previously, we spotlighted several states that are particularly “genealogy-friendly” concerning access to state vital records. Now we wade into the swamp of vital records-access horribles. At the edge of the swamp are states that have unreasonably long (100 years or more for birth records; more than fifty years for death …
March 26, 2008 Wednesday at 10:40 pm
