Graveyard Snoop

I use Stir-up Sunday to make a Christmas cake. Currently finishing in the oven.

The ingredients for making my Christmas pudding, including dried fruit, eggs, sugar, breadcrumbs, a lemon, an apple, butter and black treacle.

Me, stirring the pudding and making a wish. All the family take turns.

The pudding, covered with foil and gently steaming in a large saucepan.

In the CofE the Sunday before Advent is known as Stir-up Sunday because of the collect:

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Researchers have analyzed the genome of a man in Egypt who lived around 2855 B.C., the earliest days of ancient Egyptian dynasties. His ancestry may settle some key disputes in archaeology …

archaeology.org/issues/november-december-2025/digs-discoveries/the-egyptian-sequence/

What is the 25th amendment for if not this??? 🤬

And then you not only go on about your life, you go back to looking at these damn records.

The onslaught of cheery Ancestry com ads is coming. Stuff those ads leave out, both seen today:

How to mentally process a census record that shows a 35-yr-old grandmother of a 3-yr-old; or an "out of wedlock birth" where the parents aren't married... but they do share the same surname. #genealogy

I see you trying to cause trouble.

Genealogy continues to mess with me: I'm researching a woman whose name is Charlotte. She was born in a town called Charlotte Courthouse, VA, which is in Charlotte County VA.

I don't think that should be allowed. Authorities should have stepped in. #genhour

For all of my #genealogy and #ancestryhour peeps - you should know that recently Ancestry has changed its ToS to prevent searching of public records hosted on the Ancestry site to keep investigative genetic genealogy (IGG) practitioners and forensic genealogists (FGs) OUT. (Please read the whole 🧵)

A small, well-loved light brown Aurora brand teddy bear picked up from a snowy sidewalk

Rescued this teddy from the sidewalk near Sheridan and Winona

If you live in the area, share to help it find its owner

Me scolding my cat for breaking rules he cannot actually comprehend.

I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

"Big doings" starting in the evening. Probably more than just the fireworks. Gives you a chill to think about it.

The same notice ran the next day, and this ad was under it. #history

Story prompt/sweater scandal, 1920s style.

From the personals section. Why they didn't just go get the sweater is a mystery.

Belvidere Daily Republican; Nov 7, 1925

Ah, radium. For your health.

Belvidere Daily Republican; Aug 5, 1925 #history

This spring, new AI photo tools arrived. Genealogists experimented. Then quickly we realized: these tools don't "restore" historical photos—they may fabricate new faces.

By August, these "restorations" were everywhere, unlabeled, corrupting our shared historical record. #genealogy

Border Patrol's Greg Bovino likes to say his agents are welcomed by 99 percent of people in Chicago but as they drive around the city, they're met with constant shouts of "get the fuck out of here!"

This is real. Chicago today.

Historian uses AI to help identify Nazi in notorious Holocaust murder image Jürgen Matthäus has for years been investigating the killer – and is confident he has finally solved the mystery

I mentioned a few years ago that the spread of AI identification + history would mean the eventual ability to ID the faces of crowd members in 1920s lynching photos. This is pretty close.

We're coming for your dead racist grandpas and grandmas.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o... #history

Is there anything more tantalising than the promise of an early 19th-century letter with the postscript "Burn this immediately"?

I had them on cassette. Bear Up Bison, never say die!

I expected things to get very stupid, but I’m not sure I expected things to get this stupid this quickly.

The Family Fallout of DNA Surprises Through genetic testing, millions of Americans are estimated to have discovered that their parents aren’t who they thought. The news has upended relationships and created a community looking for answe...

I can't offer a gift link, but if you can read this article about NPEs, you should. It's a *lot* - not to mention a stroll down memory lane. #GeneticGenealogy

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

the problem with “norms” is they’re just held together with common sense and a fear of shame. when people have neither, it all collapses.

Doing some fascinating digging in the National Desertion Bureau Database, intended to keep track of those who abandoned their spouses. This guy must have been one hell of a smooth talker. 150yearsofcare.org/ndb-database #genealogy

Will be hard to explain in the future that the US government went antivax, causing a lot of avoidable suffering and death, not in response to any negative incident with vaccines, but to the biggest, fastest, most successful, most impressive vaccine rollout in history.

They really are doing the barest minimum. 😠

But I may have overwhelmed him a little.

When we were talking about visiting him in return, he said, "Well, I don't know as much about my city's #history as you do about yours..." 🫣