#roots work

[popculturegenealogy]

Tamberlane and the thorny issue of adoption in roots work

Clearly, there are different types of roots, beyond what the teacher in these panels from Tamberlane is telling her. This is NOT what you tell someone about their roots. Teacher, you are doing this all wrong!

Reprinted from my Genealogy in Popular Culture WordPress blog. Originally published on March 8, 2021.

One of my favorite ongoing webcomics, Tamberlane, hits you right in the face with an issue which often faces genealogists: adoption. Tamberlane, the story's protagonist is told by her teacher, Ms. Callie. that they will be learning about "their roots." [1] This worries her, as she first thinks that it means she literally has roots growing out of her, and later when she learns that roots make you for "who you are." She is concerned because she's from the far-off place known as "Abroad" but her friends comfort her, reminding her that her roots are in Treehollow with the rest of them because she lives there. Cur later challenges Ms. Callie, asking about students who don't know their roots and starts making a scene. Later, the teacher is flustered and doesn't know how to answer questions about "Abroad," with Jentzen kicked out of the classroom as a result, just because he asked a question! This becomes a plot point later in the series, as Cur blames Tamberlane for Jentzen getting fired, even though it isn't Tamberlane's fault, leading Piper to get in a fight with Cur. [2] As it turns out, not even Tamberlane's guardian, Belfry, can adequately explain "Abroad" to her. [3]

Ms. Callie was wrong about roots. As Becks Kobel, a death positive genealogist [4] wrote in October 2017, "we are placed within families, whether biologically or through adoption, that have a long history with all sorts of experiences." Roots are not only based in your blood, but are wider ranging than that, including your chosen family, those you surround yourselves with, and your circumstances. They can be your roots. There are even some Italian surnames, like Esposito, which were given to children in Italy who were given up by their parents or were adopted! At the same time, a surname may be assumed because of an "unofficial adoption, taking on a stepfather’s surname and so on" as was the case with one of my ancestors, Robert B. Mills II (originally Robert Barnabas Packard). Some genealogists even warn about not being "lured into sympathy research via an adoption story" while others note that DNA tests can be helpful for those with ancestors who were adopted or those looking for their birth parents. Sure, you could say that the "standard" family tree wasn't made for adoption, but that doesn't mean it is invalid, as adoptees can be heirs to estate from time to time. Some stick with the so-called standard tree, as "Geni cannot record adoptions" but that doesn't mean that records of it doesn't exist. [5] Russian genealogist Vera Miller talked about this:

Many adoptees become curious about their birth families and hopeful their questions about their separations from their families will be answered. The challenges of some adoptees from the Russian-speaking world is facing that their Russian language skills disappeared or were never developed. Thanks to the Internet, these adoptees can find their families with just as much success as adoptees from the English-speaking world.

That brings me back to Tamberlane. She was, at the beginning of the comic, found in the woods by the citizens of Treehollow and while she isn't always good with communicating verbally, she knows a bit of pidgin Trissol (Silver Sage Sign Language). She calls herself "Tamberlane" when meeting Belfry for the first time in Chapter 1, with Belfry wondering where her parents are, and who left her there. As such, the other stuff I said about adoption isn't applicable here, although it is still worth noting. Hopefully, in the future, this is explored more in the webcomic.

© 2021-2023 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Notes

[1] Caytlin Vilbrandt, Tamberlane, Chapter 4, Pages 181-190, Issue 15 on WEBTOON, Jan. 2, 2020.

[2] Caytlin Vilbrandt, Tamberlane, Chapter 4, Pages 191-199, Issue 16 on WEBTOON, Jan. 2, 2020.

[3] Caytlin Vilbrandt, Tamberlane, Chapter 4, Page 207, Issue 22 on WEBTOON, Feb. 10, 2020; Caytlin Vilbrandt, Tamberlane, Chapter 4, Page 208, Issue 23 on WEBTOON, Feb. 19, 2020

[4] She left Twitter some time ago and now occasionally posts on Instagram. So, she is still active (perhaps more on Facebook), but not in the way she used to be on social media. And that's ok.

[5] In a related note, a Puerto Rican genealogist Teresa Vega, argued that with "Ancestry doing away with <8 cM DNA matches," it would negatively impact Black and indigenous descendants, saying they should "seriously consider that they are preventing family reunification not only due to slavery, but also due to adoption, genocide, famine, etc."

[millingroundireland]

How Irish are you, anyway?

Sooner or later, the question will arise how Irish I am.

Let's start with the first generation of Irish immigrants. John R. Mills and Margaret Bibby had a number of children, two of which I'll focus on here. Since both of them were born and raised in Ireland, they would be 100% Irish, and by extension their children, all born in Warren County, New York, would be 100% Irish.

This post was originally posted on WordPress in May 2018.

The first of those children I'll focus on here is Robert Byron Mills, later called RBM I or "Uncle Rob." He had one child with a woman named Hattie Ellen Stanley in 1901, named Stanley Sterling Mills (the first name coming from Hattie's maiden name and the middle name possibly coming from the Hotel Sterling which RBM I ran). Hattie's parents, Addison and Jane. Jane's parents are not known, but Addison's are, and it is clear that his ancestors had been in America since the 1640s. With this, it seems evident that Hattie did not have Irish blood in her, as far as we know. This would make Stanley 50% Irish. For all of us, however, Stanley is a dead-end because he died in 1934 in Cincinnati, with a very mysterious life, and had no children.

Dora, Cyrus, and their children

The second of those children, I'll focus on here, is Dorothy Ann Mills, also called Dora or Dory. She married a man named Cyrus Winfield Packard, who I know from my extensive research on the Packard family, had no Irish blood in him. This means all her children would be 50% Irish. One of her children was Robert Barnabas Packard, better known as RBM II or Bert, as he was renamed either by his own choice or by Uncle Rob as Robert Byron Mills II after Dora's death in 1895 when he was adopted by Uncle Rob. Now, since he was adopted, this means that his Irish blood descends from his mother Dora. As a result, he is 50% Irish as his mother was 100% Irish, and Cyrus had no Irish blood in him.

We then get to Bert. He married Miriam E. Hirst  and had three children: Robert Byron Mills III (Bob), Helen Eileen Mills (Helen), and Carol Ruth Mills. To my knowledge, the Hirsts were living in America by the 19th century, and likely earlier, with ultimate roots in England like the Stanley family which was mentioned earlier in this post. As such, they did not have Irish blood. With Bert having Irish blood, but Miriam not, this means that their three children would be 25% Irish. Without getting into the weeds too much, and off track, it seems evident that none of the spouses of Bob, Helen, or Carol had any Irish blood in them, but rather that of those who had immigrated from Europe, whether Albania, Germany, France, or elsewhere. With this, it would mean that all the children of Bob, Helen, and Carol, of which there are many, would be 12.5% Irish. Some of their children, had children, of which this writer is part of. This would make me, and all others of the same generation, you could say, 6.25% Irish. [1]

With this, you can't go around and wave an "Irish pride" flag or anything as that amount is utterly minuscule. But it is not insignificant. As such, it is part of a collective ancestry.

© 2018-2023 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Notes

[1] According to my calculations, looking at previous family lineage, I am 25% Austro-Hungarian, 25% Italian, about 2% English, about 6% French, about 13% German, and about 6% Irish, as noted above.

[locusfandomtime]

The maths fandom is wild. “Real” and “imaginary” numbers? I think you mean canon and non-canon. You guys seriously go “this is my number oc his name is i and he is the square root of -1” when in numbers canon lore it’s actually impossible to square root a negative but sure whatever. “Complex numbers”? I think you mean a character x oc ship. “f(x) = 3x - 5”? That is self-insert fanfiction.

[chloesimaginationthings]

i absolutely love your characterization of movie vanessa,, like she is so mentally unwell but also she is full of whimsy!

The duality of Vanessa Shelly,,

[sheepory]

i CANT keep drawing yuri i HAVE to go to BED

[thelaurenshippen]

a remake of "you've got mail" called "you've got kudos" about two fic writers who make flirty comments on each other's fics, only to realize that they already know each other because they used to be on opposite sides of a fandom war when they were teenagers under different usernames

[little-pondhead]

in my humble opinion, dorathea should look more badass

also this turned into perspective practice by accident?? didn't want her to be a floating neck i guess

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Happy Valentine's Day! (and this blog's first post anniversary!)

[dantelionwishes]

clavell asks player who his crush is (speaking of, where's clive?)

[centaurianthropology]

One thing that I think a lot of Disco Elysium meta misses (likely because a lot of it is very clearly written by young Americans writing from an intensely American-centric cultural perspective without even really realizing it) is that one of the singular and central themes of the game is massive-scale generational trauma in a home that is economically collapsing as its resources and people are being drained by an occupation.  People have noted that no one tries to help Harry, despite the fact his mental illness is incredibly obvious to everyone around him.  He tells Kim that he completely lost his memory, and Kim politely asks him to focus on the work.  He tells Gottlieb that he had a heart attack, and Gottlieb tells him that if he’s still alive it couldn’t have been that bad.  That he’ll drop dead sooner or later, but then so does everyone.

And that’s the most important thing: so does everyone.  Look at Martinaise.  Look at the world in which Harry lives.  It is not our own, but it is adjacent to ours.  More specifically, it is clearly adjacent to the states of the Eastern Bloc: overtaken and occupied by a faraway government that clearly doesn’t care about Revachol or its people.  And that is obvious in every tired face, every defeated citizen, everyone trying to eke out a little happiness or meaning in spite of the overwhelming trauma and damage around them.  The buildings are still half-destroyed.  The bullet holes are still in the walls.  The revolution was decades before, but it still feels to the people there like a fresh wound.  The number of men of Harry’s generation who are not alcoholic or otherwise deeply fucked up are very few.  Some, like Kim, hide it better, but the deeper you dig into his history, the more you realize how damaged Kim is.  He’s more than a little trigger happy, and hates that about himself, but he is a product of his environment: Kim’s entire life is seeing people he cared about shot and killed, so his instinct now is to shoot first himself, to protect those few people left who still matter to him.

Harry is not unique in his trauma.  He is a distillation of an entire culture of people who tried to rise up and make something beautiful, and were instead routed and occupied.  He is trapped between the occupation and the people on the ground, along with all the rest of the RCM.  Their authority comes from the occupying government, but it is implied that they were formed out of the remnants of the citizens militia which sprung up from Revachol itself as a way to try to mitigate some of the horrors being committed on its streets.  The Moralintern sure as hell wasn’t going to get their hands dirty, so they happily conscripted (and therefore could better control) this group, who are only recognized in certain places, and whose authority mostly amounts to giving out fines.  The RCM is corrupt, but it is corrupt in the same way its culture is.  Bribes are considered standard with them, not a moral failing, but a necessity, so long as those bribes are correctly logged as ‘donations’.  It’s how the RCM stays afloat, and the rest of Revachol completely understands that.  Everyone would take a bribe if it meant they kept eating.  Everyone would take a little under-the-table money if it meant keeping a roof over their heads.  The officersof the RCM certainly don’t make enough to see a doctor.  They have an in-house lazarus, and if he can’t fix them they just die.  Mental health care?  What mental health care?  Harry doesn’t get it for the same reason no one else does: it doesn’t really seem to exist.  There are no counselors, no psychologists, no psychiatrists.  How would they even start?  If the world is what is broken, if everyone is suffering a similar catastrophic amount, it makes sense that Harry’s trauma would simply get rolled up with all the rest.  Kim asks him to get on with the job because Harry’s suffering is not remarkable in Revachol.  He is one of an entire generation who have an astronomical number of orphans from the revolution, and so many younger people are left more or less orphans as their parents drink themselves into oblivion like Cuno’s father.  So Harry’s truly unique attribute is embodying all that trauma, having it all inside of him, filling him to bursting.

To really engage with the themes of the game, engaging first and foremost with the reality of Revachol is imperative.  Imposing our own reality onto Revachol, particularly if coming from an American perspective (which tend to have the habit of both viewing the world through an American lens and not realizing they’re doing it because they’ve never experienced a different lens), will always feel shallow to me because of this.

All that is to say, I would love to hear some more explicitly European meta about this game, and especially Eastern European meta.  If anyone can point me to some good, juicy essays from that perspective, I would be grateful!

[popculturegenealogy]

Mira and a town of relatives

Mira and her father in the episode "The Great Diwali Mystery"

Mira, Royal Detective is one of my favorite series. I have to write about it here on this blog because unlike some other shows, the town where this Indian-inspired series is set, Jalpur, the protagonist, Mira, appears to be related to...everyone! This is like any small town. Anyway, I'd like to break it down for you all, because family ties and the value of family is central to this series, unlike any other that I have ever seen.

Reprinted from my Genealogy in Popular Culture WordPress blog. Originally published on June 2, 2021.

We do not currently know who Shanti's husband is, or if he is still alive. I created this using one of my favorite sites for creating family trees, Family Echo

Let's start with Mira, herself. She was appointed by Queen Shanti to be the royal detective in the city, and she considers her to be like a daughter. Shanti herself has two sons: Prince Neel, a brilliant and talented inventor, often flying around the city in his flycycle or some other invention, and Prince Veer, the aspiring King of Jalpur. Neel has a crush on Mira. We also know that he has a grand-grandmother who was an inventor and built a submarine, as shown in a recent episode, and has great aunt, Rupa. As for Mira, she has two friends, mongooses who help her out on cases: Mikku and Chikku. They are brothers and have two cousins, who are also mongooses: Preeti and Neeti, who are skilled in rope gymnastics. [1]

Mira, however, is NOT directly related to Queen Shanti. Her father is Sahil, who calls her "beti" when talking to her. Two of her friends, Priya and Meena, are sisters, and her cousins, as is Chotu, a younger brother of Priya and Meena (also known as Mina). Their mother is Pushpa, who is also Mira's aunt. Presumably, Kamala is also her cousin, who has a younger sister named Dimple. The same can, possibly, be said for her friends Pinky, Dhruv Sharma, and Sandeep. Apart from them are two brothers, Ranjeet and Manjeet, a music teacher (Sanjeev Joshi), who are her friends. [2] In a few episodes, the royal Nayapuram family appears, comprised of a king, queen, and their daughter, Princess Shivani.

In order to explain this, I came up with this chart created via one originally shared by Kathleen Brandt, a genealogist who wrote that it is "one of the biggest errors made when referencing cousin relationships."

So, we currently do not know the parents of Kamala and Dimple, Dhruv (whose surname is Sharma), Sandeep, or Pinky. But, it is possible that at least one of their parents is a brother or sister of Sahil and Pushpa. There are also many, many unnamed uncles that Mira meets in the town, meaning that they may be some of these people. Some of these parents may have been featured in some episodes but I'm not aware of them. That is definitely a possibility. Saying all of this, it is possible that Mira is calling older men she meets in Jalpur "Uncle" since, as some have noted, "kids routinely call complete strangers “Uncle” and “Aunty”" even if they aren't related. As Times of India noted in 2015, it is "very common" for those in India to call those older than themselves "Aunty" or "Uncle," with this done out of "respect for the elderly or for fellow humans." That could be the case here, even though the terms can also be used for those that someone is related to, by family ties.

Even so, I think that Pushpa is Mira's aunt, since her name in the show is literally "Auntie Pushpa." [3] In the end, I'll keep an eye on this series and possible write another post on this show later.

© 2021-2023 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Notes

[1] In a recent episode, "The Case of the Vanishing Picnic," Mikku says "its not every day there are cousins that visit from the big city," referring to Neeti and Preeti, showing Mira secret family recipes they have prepared.

[2] This isn't accounting for the Palace Tailor, the two bandits (Manish and Poonam), Ram Sing Ji, and Deputy Oosha who are likely not related to Mira.

[3] In the episode "The Case of the Lost Treehouse," Mira's pa says "there's the tapestry your Auntie Pushpa made for the wall," making it clear this is the case.

© 2020-2023 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

[veryintricaterituals]

What we (Guillermo) wanted:

What we (Guillermo) got:

[shadowhandss60]

Chaol: This is my wife Yrene, she’s a healer.

Dorian: This is my wife Manon Blackbeak-

Chaol: The White Demon?

Dorian: Actually, she’s Queen of the Witches now.

Manon: I’m a reverse healer.

Chaol:

Yrene:

Manon: You know, because I kill people.

Chaol: I-

Yrene: I like her.

Dorian: I know right?

[cuddlebugmonster]

After months of prep and hyping up i think I’m ready to introduce this little trouble maker

Please welcome Pluto ! My own version and design of a Donnie Krang baby

(Warning there will be some movie spoilers)

After infiltrating the Krang ship, Donnie and Mikey are tasked to take over the controls and to do that, Donnie fuses with the ship. However when Krang prime notices the turtles, he rips Donnie out of the ship, violently severing the link.

In my AU, because the link was cut by force, a part of Donnie was left behind with the ship, a copy of them. When the ship explodes, drebris is spread across NY, Krang technology and flesh everywhere ! However from the debris, a new creature starts to grow, half turtle, half Krang, birthing a new species, PLUTO !!! >:D

This little creature is one of my all time favorite designs i’ve made in the Rottmnt fandom, I’m very proud of it and hope to finally be able to draw more of this rascal !

I also want to thank @cupcakeslushie for giving me the extra push with Mayday, Pluto doesn’t need to just hang in my files anymore XD, Thank you !!

[zeramara]

Hello Trigunblr, happy WooWoo Wednesday! I drew a poster for Tristamp for one of my class finals, really pleased with how it turned out! There's an animated version where the markings glow and fade away, I'll add it under the cut.

(Note for this version, I made it before I realized that I forgot to add Meryl and Vash's earrings, but I'm too lazy to fix it rn)

[cokalee]

Getaway Car 🚗