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Monthly Archives: March 2008

the crusading legacy and Y-DNA in Lebanon

Monday, March 31, 2008

A new genetic study (Pierre A. Zalloua et al., “Y-Chromosomal Diversity in Lebanon Is Structured by Recent Historical Events,” American Journal of Human Genetics [2008] 01.020) shows a small proportion of WES1, a Western-European haplotype within the R1b haplogroup of DNA signatures of the Y-chromosome, present among the modern Christian population of Lebanon. The study, […]

Filed in medievalia | Comments (0)

English ‘title’ offered as TV promo

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

I haven’t actually seen the cable TV serial “The Tudors” but I can understand heavy marketing for its new season to cash in on the recent theatrical release of the unrelated Boleyn film (which owes much to the work of genealogist Tony Hoskins, a probable Henry VIII descendant via one of Mary Boleyn’s ‘Carey’ children). […]

Filed in heraldry, medievalia | Comments (0)

cousin Wilbur’s B-24 nose art — update

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

As a followup to my post and queries about cousin Wilbur’s (S/Sgt Wilbur F. Whiting, USAAF) sketch for the Scrubbed Goose, the helpful folks over on the message boards at armyairforces.com haven’t been able to locate an actual aircraft with that name, but it could have been a sketch for a plane which was lost […]

Filed in artifacts, militaria, US genealogy | Comments (1)

Marvin Hunter Taylor WWI journal: into the German trenches

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

I just noticed (via google) that my grandfather is mentioned in a recent book on the war: Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (Holt, 1994), p. 443, on the allied advance near Soissons on 18 July 1918: Pershing’s biographer cites the diary of Marvin H. Taylor, who recorded reaching a German machine-gun […]

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Quaternionenadler

Saturday, March 8, 2008

A query forwarded to me by a friend got me interested in the ‘Quaternionenadler‘: a German imperial eagle with the coats of arms of the estates of the empire superimposed on it, a Hapsburg emblem popularized around 1510. Here it is, in a beautiful painted two-page print by Augsburg artist David de Necker: While it’s […]

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Marvin Hunter Taylor — journal of a WWI infantry officer

Sunday, March 2, 2008

In the spring of 1917 my grandfather, aged 21, left college to become an infantry officer in the first wave of volunteers for what would be called the American Expeditionary Force in France; he was comissioned lieutenant in August and shipped to France the next month. He saw service in the heavy fighting in northeastern […]

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