“An entry in a late sixteenth-century register has revealed that a ship known as “William” of Aberdeen made a voyage to “the new fund land” (Newfoundland) in 1596. It is the earliest documented reference to a Scottish ship sailing to North America.“ “Historian discovers earliest evidence of a Scottish ship sailing to North America“, Medievalists.net (Dec….
Author: Justin Durand
Geni Projects
These are a few of the projects I started at Geni.com. Many of my Geni projects reflect the work I did many years ago in graduate school about fictional genealogy in the Middle Ages. Back then, my primary interest was in the chansons de geste, the Arthurian legends, and the Scandinavian sagas. Nowadays, my interest…
Recovering the Gunn lineage
I don’t have any known Gunn ancestry but I got interested in them a lifetime ago. Someone at the Family History Center in Salt Lake City suggested the Swanstroms, if they were originally Scottish, might have been Gunns. Actually, I think the idea was that the Swanstroms absolutely, positively had to be Gunns for a…
Post-Christian America
My sense from talking to our customers is that there is trend toward post-Christian America that is likely to be vaguely pagan, but not exactly pagan in the way my generation (Boomers) might think of it. “I’ve become interested in books and arguments that suggest that there actually is, or might be, a genuinely post-Christian…
Jews in the New World, II
We’ve seen this idea, now very common, that many Hispanos in the American Southwest have crypto-Jewish ancestry. The evidence for this exotic ancestry is weak. The story seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, and there is some reason to believe it might have its roots in the 19th and 20th century Seventh Day Adventists….