It's been said a million times, but I can't stress enough how all of this -- the gaslighting, the "one bad day" downplaying, the "healing and unity" -- is so eerily like the dynamics of an abusive relationship. In which the victim starts to think "Maybe I'm just exaggerating."
Have they started eye-rolling at members of Congress talking about being traumatized? Because that's next. Mark my words. ("Nobody was really in life-threatening danger...")
(OK, so I must have missed that. But I was right. 🙄)
And Kellyanne Conway helped put this ship in the water with her "alternative facts" and her maestro-level gaslighting, so she can fuck all the way off with her "these events were outrageous and inexcusable."
Perhaps the canniest thing this administration ever did was poison the channels of information transmission, making people question things that were indisputably true. @pashulman and I tried to explain the danger of this with one teeny tiny example here: washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-h…
This lie about the 1924 Democratic convention continues to be spread daily. There is simply no undoing it now.
Part of that is due to a cultural shift, as well. I wrote these words in 2014.
Over a year ago, I volunteered to help on the case of a Jewish woman who was found as a toddler in an orphanage after the Holocaust. She died a few years ago having lived her entire life never knowing who she really was or where she came from. She didn’t even know her real name.
She had DNA tested, though, which gave us a path to try to find her family. But this case was complicated in multiple ways and we were repeatedly stymied. We so wanted to be able to give her daughter answers. And some sense of closure, whatever that might mean.
The country is literally ON FIRE.
Almost 200,000 people are dead.
Children can't go to school.
But yes, that debate over Adele's hair was very troubling indeed, Ms. Pletka.
And don't even get me started on civil and human rights violations.
I'm going to take a wild guess that Ms. Pletka doesn't routinely see family trees like mine, where the circled red x's are all people who were murdered by fascists.
But yes. Tell me more about the deadly scourge of "Manhattan-San Francisco progressive mores."
Today in random #genealogy tips: As I work on trees, I so often see people who've fallen into easily avoidable traps and added the wrong people to their trees.
I like the metaphor of a logic grid puzzle.
You have to make sure all the facts about each person line up.
That means if you're looking at someone who was born in Lithuania in 1875 and whose eldest daughter was born in Lithuania in 1905, the arrival manifest for an unmarried man with a similar name who arrived as a child in 1880 is probably not your guy.
One trick I use if a naturalization is not readily available to pinpoint the arrival is to look for the arrival of the children. It's sometimes easier to find them on manifests than it is to find their parents.
"So if you’ve been laying awake at night wondering, “What exactly is Joe Exotic’s connection to Catherine the Great of Russia and the Seven Years War?” get comfortable. Because I have answers."
Sending this one out to the #twitterstorians in need of a diversion right now.
Oh, and btw? Bonus trivia: you know who else is descended from ethnic Germans who moved to the Russian empire and then left to farm in the American midwest? Why, Fox News’ resident immigrant hater Tomi Lahren, that’s who!
So the cool thing about knowing lots of genealogists is that 20 minutes after you post this, the death certificate shows up in your inbox. Thanks, @alccalz!
@alccalz As some of you have heard me say before, the flu devastated my family. My grandfather lost his 27-year-old wife on October 13, 1918 and his 22-year-old brother two days later.