Genealogy

As a boy, Father William Sanchez sensed he was different. His Catholic family spun tops on Christmas, shunned pork and whispered of a past in medieval Spain. If anyone knew the secret, they weren't telling, and Sanchez stopped asking. Then three years ago, after watching a program on genealogy, Sanchez sent for a DNA kit that could help track a person's background through genetic footprinting. He soon got a call from Bennett Greenspan, owner of the Houston-based testing company.

Rough-Hewn Land A Geologic Journey From California to the Rocky Mountains Keith Heyer Meldahl University of California Press: 297 pp., $34.95 Think of the West and what comes to mind are vertiginous peaks, sculpted tablelands and the infinite vistas of basin and range country. In other words, geology. Westerners live in the shadow of mountains that are still rising, on the edge of a continent on the move, over fault systems that can unleash the power of nuclear bombs.

They are the most traditional-looking Indians in Santa Barbara County. Many wear their hair in braids and dress in full Indian regalia at public hearings. Some have assumed names such as White Bear and Mushu. They have more political power, county officials say, and have made more money monitoring construction sites for Chumash artifacts than any other Indian group in the area.

President Obama has found another long-lost cousin: Scott Brown, the Republican state senator from Massachusetts who won the Senate seat long held by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. The president and the senator-elect are 10th cousins, according to the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Brown's victory Jan. 19 over Democratic candidate Martha Coakley cost the Democrats their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and may have jeopardized passage of Obama's top legislative priority -- a healthcare overhaul.

At first glance, the photo-copied documents simply looked like government forms and applications. But when Susanne Mori read more closely, she found the story of her grandfather's life as he made his way in America more than five decades ago. Those 23 pages of facts and dates revealed how a young man, Jinbei Mori, left Japan and arrived in San Francisco the month after the 1906 earthquake, how he spent decades working for the Union Pacific...

With an archivist for a mother, Emily Reid has grown up immersed in other people's histories. She traipsed through cemeteries at 3, and learned to look up other people's birth and death certificates on microfilm as soon as she could read. It wasn't until she came across the name William Fuqua, though, that history came alive for her. Assigned as a high school freshman to research her family tree, Emily discovered that she was related to Fuqua, a French Huguenot farmer.

Colleges have tried many tactics to attract capable minority students and make them feel welcome. They've offered scholarships, started support groups, hired counselors, overlooked low test scores. At Gettysburg College, they're about to try genealogy. Starting in March, this Lutheran-affiliated liberal arts school, where just 40 of 1,850 students are black, is opening an "intercultural resource center" where all students, but especially African-Americans, can learn how to research their roots.

A $15,113 federal grant is enabling the city to purchase for its library system more genealogy books, library director Ron Hayden said Thursday. Earlier this week, the City Council formally received the money and passed it on to the library system. The money is part of the federal government's program to encourage urban libraries not to duplicate expensive, specialized collections, Hayden said.

Mimi Lozano-Holtzman has learned through genealogical research that her family lines branch throughout many regions of the Spanish-speaking world. It's a fact that many Latinos discover as they trace their roots, she said. Lozano-Holtzman explains: " Somos primos --we are all cousins."

When a relative told Marjorie Sholes-Higgins of her grandfather's vast family, she decided it was time to explore her past and dig deeply into her African American roots. Sixteen years and 1,379 relatives later, she is amazed at the complexity of what she found. It is both an epic tale that unfolds on three continents and a personal story of struggle and survival. "All that from one man," she said.

At first glance, the photo-copied documents simply looked like government forms and applications. But when Susanne Mori read more closely, she found the story of her grandfather's life as he made his way in America more than five decades ago. Those 23 pages of facts and dates revealed how a young man, Jinbei Mori, left Japan and arrived in San Francisco the month after the 1906 earthquake, how he spent decades working for the Union Pacific...

The kernel of Betsy Carter's third novel, "The Puzzle King," is a powerful bit of family lore that takes up no more than a paragraph of her 2002 memoir, "Nothing to Fall Back On": the story of the time, in 1936, that her mother's German-born American aunt, Flora, traveled back to her native country to get dozens of her relatives out. The gift she brought for the American consul was a copy of that year's hottest book in the States, "Gone With the...

Pity the poor desk clerk at one Marina del Rey hotel. Sixty guests, all named Gerstenberger, are spending the week there after converging on Los Angeles as part of an unusual attempt to trace their ancestry back 800 years. It's the fourth time that the Gerstenbergers' "World Family Reunion" has united Gerstenbergers from Europe and North America. About 90 Gerstenbergers attended the first one, which was staged in the tiny hamlet that started it all: Gerstenberg, Germany.

Floyd Ramsey became puzzled as he researched a local history project. Dolly Copp, a 19th-century farm woman, seemed gregarious, but fidgeted nervously with her necklace beads whenever a stagecoach stopped near her farm in Gorham, N.H. "The beads part didn't fit in," Ramsey said. Then he learned that Irene P. Lambert could produce a personality sketch from a sample of Copp's handwriting.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said he wants a DNA test to determine whether he is related to former segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond through his great-grandfather, a slave owned by an ancestor of the late senator. "I can't find out anything more shocking than I've already learned," Sharpton told the Daily News. Professional genealogists found that Sharpton's great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave owned by Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was Strom Thurmond's great-great-grandfather.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said Sunday it was the "most shocking" news of his life when the civil rights leader learned he was a descendant of a slave owned by relatives of Strom Thurmond, the late senator who once led the segregationist South. "I couldn't describe the emotions that I've had over the last two or three days thinking about this," he said at a news conference. "Everything from anger and outrage to reflection, and to some pride and glory."

At a long table in the quiet, narrow Burbank storefront between the Downtown Barber Shop and the Specialty Seal Co., Beverly Keeling chased the German schoolgirl back through the generations. The girl, who died a woman in 1884, had been Keeling's husband's grandmother. She had largely been lost to family memory because her widower had soon remarried. No one knew, for example, from where in Germany this grandmother, Anna Juetting, had come.

As a journalist you expect to write stories about the weird and wonderful things that happen in other people's lives. But you don't expect the stories you write to cause weird and wonderful things to happen in yours. But two weeks ago that's what happened to me. I'd just moved to Los Angeles, leaving behind my beach bungalow in Ventura, my adorable green-eyed cat, my old friends and my old life.

A potential conflict between Jewish organizations and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over vicarious baptism was averted Monday when the church said that Simon Wiesenthal's name was removed from the church's genealogical records. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles had demanded earlier in the day that Wiesenthal's name be removed from the church's online International Genealogical Index, the church's database of posthumous "ordinances" or vicarious baptisms.

African Americans hoping to use DNA to find their roots may have to look harder than previously thought, researchers said Thursday in a study suggesting Africans are too genetically mixed to make tracing easy. Several companies now offer to help Americans trace their African ancestry using mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to children virtually unaltered.