GenealogyMedia.com

I have com­plet­ed post­ing the text of David Gra­ham’s His­to­ry of the Gra­ham Fam­i­ly (pri­vate­ly print­ed: Clay­ton, West Vir­ginia, 1899).

Tonight, I post­ed the last 99 pages of the 119-page vol­ume. I will do some addi­tion­al proof­read­ing, and improve the nav­i­ga­tion, but the full text is avail­able now.

The book details the his­to­ry of the Gra­ham fam­i­ly in Augus­ta Coun­ty, Vir­ginia and Green­bri­er Coun­ty, Mon­roe Coun­ty, and Sum­mers Coun­ty, Vir­ginia (lat­er West Vir­ginia) from the 1720’s or 1730’s through the 1890s. There are sto­ries of war­fare with and abduc­tion by Indi­ans and the Civ­il War, lists of slaves owned by Col. James Gra­ham (who built the Gra­ham house, which still stands, and remains one of the old­est two-sto­ry struc­tures west of the Alleghe­nies), and many oth­er tid­bits.

For Gra­hams of the Val­ley of Vir­ginia, who migrat­ed across the Alleghe­nies into what is now Green­bri­er, Mon­roe, and Sum­mers Coun­ties, West Vir­ginia, this is a sem­i­nal work. While un-sourced, the book con­tains a lot of detail, includ­ing tran­scrip­tions of wills and oth­er doc­u­ments, which can be val­i­dat­ed with orig­i­nal sources.

I am begin­ning to post tran­scrip­tions and doc­u­ments on this site.

My first tran­scrip­tion is of David Gra­ham’s His­to­ry of the Gra­ham Fam­i­ly (pri­vate­ly print­ed: Clay­ton, West Vir­ginia, 1899). This book, authored by my my sec­ond great grand uncle at the age of 78, is an invalu­able resource. While David Gra­ham did not source his mate­ri­als, there are some ref­er­enced items that can eas­i­ly be found in court records, such as wills and deeds. The book is well writ­ten, and the author had a fair sense of humor and whim­sy. It is also a book of its time, and so there are racial, eth­nic, and his­tor­i­cal notions that do not fit with how we see the world today. For exam­ple, he spends a fair amount of time explain­ing that the Gra­hams, while being “Scotch-Irish” were not at all “Irish.”

Tonight, I am post­ing the first 21 pages of the 119-page vol­ume. The rest of the book will fol­low short­ly, as will oth­er tran­scrip­tions.

My father, Carl Lawrence Jones, was a great inspi­ra­tion to me, and a man who lived through many strug­gles.

At the age of 16, he dropped out of school and took a train from West Logan, West Vir­ginia to Seat­tle, Wash­ing­ton, where he lived on his Uncle Orvis’s farm and took a bus in to work in the stock room at Boe­ing.

While still under age, he joined the Navy with the approval of his par­ents, but end­ed up state­side, main­ly in the Nebras­ka Navy at the US Naval Ammu­ni­tion Depot, Hast­ings, Nebras­ka. (It was in Hast­ings that he met my moth­er.)

He was a recov­er­ing alco­holic, sober from 1964 until the day he died. He felt an emo­tion­al oblig­a­tion to help oth­ers try­ing to recov­er from alco­holism, and was an active mem­ber of a small group that met orig­i­nal­ly in every­one’s homes.

My dad was large­ly self-edu­cat­ed, but had attend­ed at least three col­leges: Far­ragut Col­lege and Tech­ni­cal Insti­tute, Ida­ho (a school that had appeared just after the War on the site of Far­ragut Naval Train­ing Sta­tion, and did­n’t last long), 1946–1949, before going broke; San Jose State Col­lege (just after my par­ents mar­ried); and LA Val­ley Col­lege (lat­er called CSU North­ridge), but nev­er received a degree. He told me that he was only an alge­bra class away from his Bach­e­lor’s in busi­ness admin­is­tra­tion. He nev­er felt good at math, and tried more than once to fin­ish col­lege-lev­el alge­bra. (In his lat­er years, he was a long-time trea­sur­er of AA orga­ni­za­tions in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia and New Mex­i­co.)

He was a vora­cious and wide read­er, inter­est­ed in lit­er­a­ture, cul­ture, med­i­cine, psy­chi­a­try, big band jazz, social jus­tice, his­to­ry, and anthro­pol­o­gy. The list of writ­ers he intro­duced me to, and whose works adorned our walls was sim­ply amaz­ing now that I think about it: James Joyce, Bro­nis­law Mali­nows­ki, E. B. White, Franz Kaf­ka, Gus­tave Flaubert, Sopho­cles, John Stein­beck, Mar­garet Mead, Dashiell Ham­mett, Lewis Thomas, Her­man Melville, Kurt Von­negut, Guy de Mau­pas­sant, Lucretius Appelius, D. H. Lawrence, Samuel John­son, Lil­lian Hell­man, Bernard DeVo­to, C. S. Lewis (the non-fic­tion works), W. Som­er­set Maugh­am, William Faulkn­er (espe­cial­ly The Reivers) … I could go on, and prob­a­bly will at some point.

He was ded­i­cat­ed to the social equal­i­ty of African-Amer­i­cans and grew up offend­ed by Jim Crow West Vir­ginia. He told me once that the main rea­son he left the South was to get away from the treat­ment of African-Amer­i­cans he wit­nessed there. He was also a life-long sup­port­er of the union move­ment, his father hav­ing been a long-time union local pres­i­dent of the Inter­na­tion­al Broth­er­hood of Rail­way Train­men. In pol­i­tics, he was an FDR Demo­c­rat.

He was inter­est­ed in music, espe­cial­ly in the big band jazz and folk music of his youth. He also lis­tened to more recent jazz, and pop­u­lar music, includ­ing Jim Croce, the Bea­t­les, and Eric Clap­ton. In clas­si­cal music, he favored the Roman­tic peri­od, espe­cial­ly Beethoven.

His work life had its chal­lenges. His expe­ri­ences in the Navy and at Boe­ing led him toward aero­space as he moved to Los Ange­les in the late 1940’s from Ida­ho. He worked in the stock room at Borg-Warn­er, and lat­er was in pur­chas­ing at a num­ber of air­plane man­u­fac­tur­ers and retro-fit­ters: Ted Smith, Amer­i­can Avi­a­tion, and Vol­par. The work was cycli­cal, how­ev­er, and he was often out of work because of a lay­off (Amer­i­can Avi­a­tion and Vol­par), or a fac­to­ry mov­ing to Texas (Ted Smith). He did what he had to do, and in his 60s, for exam­ple, was doing paint­ing when he could­n’t come by a job in aero­space pur­chas­ing.

As you may have been able to tell, I felt an affin­i­ty with my father that goes beyond words. There were many ways that we thought alike, had sim­i­lar tastes and predilec­tions. He liked a leisure­ly day with a book bet­ter than most peo­ple. He could also be dif­fi­cult to get close to, and argu­men­ta­tive. I believe much of this stemmed from a sad­ness that he was able to let go of in his lat­er years. He told me that Christ­mas was always a sad time for him, and lat­er, that this feel­ing had soft­ened, and that he no longer felt that way.

I wish he were around and healthy, as there is much he would be inter­est­ed in the fam­i­ly sto­ries I have uncov­ered. And I would like to sit down and final­ly read Stend­hal’s The Red and The Black with him, as I long said I would …

“Far­ragut State Park,” Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farragut_State_Park : accessed 12 May 2010.

The Otis His­tor­i­cal Archives of the Nation­al Muse­um of Health and Med­i­cine was cre­at­ed in 1971 to house the Muse­um’s rare and his­toric books.

“The Archives has sev­er­al strengths. The Muse­um’s unique her­itage makes it a rich repos­i­to­ry for infor­ma­tion on Amer­i­can mil­i­tary med­i­cine, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Civ­il War peri­od. The archives is also home to an exten­sive pho­to­graph­ic col­lec­tion, includ­ing many ear­ly pho­tomi­cro­graphs, abun­dant exam­ples of med­ical illus­tra­tion from the Civ­il War and World War I, films and videos, and trade lit­er­a­ture and adver­tise­ments from the late 19th cen­tu­ry.”

I know that the next time I vis­it Wash­ing­ton, DC, if I can arrange in advance, I hope to spend an after­noon look­ing at the med­ical doc­u­men­ta­tion about the Civ­il War, espe­cial­ly the expe­ri­ences in pris­ons and field hos­pi­tals.

If you plan to vis­it, check their web­site first, as their hours are cur­rent­ly Mon­day through Fri­day 9:00 a.m. — 4 p.m., by appoint­ment only. You can con­tact the archivist at: (202) 782‑2212.

The Archives has begun a pro­gram to dig­i­tize por­tions of its col­lec­tion “writ­ten or held by the Muse­um and not in copy­right” and make them freely avail­able on its web­site. Among the titles avail­able on the Otis His­tor­i­cal Archives Down­load Page are:

• The Med­ical and Sur­gi­cal His­to­ry of the War of the Rebel­lion (1861–1865), (pub­lished between 1870 and 1883). A mon­u­men­tal, six-vol­ume work on this crit­i­cal sub­ject. Dur­ing the Civ­il War, more sol­diers died of dis­ease and in med­ical treat­ment than in direct com­bat. This describes the state of the med­ical pro­fes­sion in the field, and the nature of Civ­il War wounds, ill­ness­es, and treat­ments. It is indis­pens­able for the Civ­il War researcher.
• Med­ical Depart­ment of the Unit­ed States Army in the World War, anoth­er quite exten­sive set of vol­umes, fif­teen in all, pub­lished between 1923 and 1929. I have not delved into this one, but want to see what I can learn about the Span­ish Influen­za epi­dem­ic, which killed more Amer­i­cans than World War I itself. (Among the vic­tims were my great grand­moth­er, Alice Mar­garet Gregg, her daugh­ter Bethene Blanche John­son, and Alice’s niece, Char­lotte Gregg. Anoth­er nephew prob­a­bly died of it, though it may have been too ear­ly in the epi­dem­ic to have been cor­rect­ly diag­nosed.)
• The Annu­al (Year­book) of the Wal­ter Reed Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal from 1921, 1923, 1925, 1926, and 1927, and Taps, the year­book from 1929, 1930, and 1931.
• A Med­ical Sur­vey of the Bitu­mi­nous-Coal Indus­try (1947), Coal Mines Admin­is­tra­tion, US Depart­ment of the Inte­ri­or.
• Dec­o­ra­tions and Medals of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca (1943), John Wyeth and Broth­er.

The two titles that were pub­lished by the Muse­um itself and are avail­able on their web­site are:

• The Armed Forces Insti­tute of Pathol­o­gy — Its First Cen­tu­ry: 1862–1962 (1962)
• A His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States Army Med­ical Muse­um 1862 to 1917 com­piled from the Offi­cial Records (1917) by Daniel S. Lamb

Despite an expand­ing wealth of online resources, geneal­o­gists will always need to “hit the road.” In addi­tion to vis­it­ing local repos­i­to­ries, court hous­es, and libraries where unique and “not-yet-online” resources are avail­able, geneal­o­gists want to vis­it old farms, church­es, and ceme­ter­ies. They want to see the home places of their ances­tors. They want to feel the wind on the prairie of Nebras­ka or see the snow fall on a New Hamp­shire field.

Through the use of some handy soft­ware and hard­ware tools, the tra­di­tion of the geneal­o­gy trip is becom­ing eas­i­er to man­age and eas­i­er to accom­plish.

The key to a suc­cess­ful jour­ney, whether it’s a genealog­i­cal research trip or a vaca­tion to the islands, is plan­ning. You want to pack the right stuff, get the tick­ets, and arrange for pet sit­ting. More specif­i­cal­ly for a geneal­o­gy trip, in addi­tion to your research plan, you want to know how to find the old home­stead, the repos­i­to­ries, and the ceme­ter­ies. In oth­er words, you want to place your fam­i­ly his­to­ry locales on a con­tem­po­rary map.

Read more

Randy Seaver at Genea-Mus­ings has post­ed his ideas for Sat­ur­day night geneal­o­gy fun. I’m game!

Randy asks us to think about and respond to the fol­low­ing:

“1. List your matri­lin­eal line — your moth­er, her moth­er, etc. back to the first iden­ti­fi­able moth­er. Note: this line is how your mito­chon­dr­i­al DNA was passed to you!

“2. Tell us if you have had your mito­chon­dr­i­al DNA test­ed, and if so, which Hap­logroup you are in.

“3. Post your respons­es on your own blog post, in Com­ments to this blog post, or in a Note or sta­tus line on Face­book.”

Here’s my matri­lin­eal line:

a. Jor­dan D. Jones
b. Alice May Hill (liv­ing) m. Carl Lawrence Jones
c. Helen Kjer­s­tine John­son (1894, Ord, Val­ley Co., NE — 1976, Simi Val­ley, Ven­tu­ra Co., CA) m. Ernest Melvin Hill
d. Alice Mar­garet Gregg (1870, East Nod­away, Adams Co., IA — 1919, Ord, Val­ley Co., NE) m. Nels “E” John­son
e. Helen Edwina Arnold (1847, Wheel­ing, Ohio Co., VA — 1922, Des Moines Co., IA)
f. Esther Ward (cir­ca 1821, prob­a­bly near Ohio Co., VA — unknown) m. Paul Arnold
g. [Prob­a­bly Sarah LNU [pos­si­bly Swan] (cir­ca 1796, PA — 1863) m. Joseph Ward]
h. [Unknown, but pos­si­bly Eliz­a­beth Bowen (1773, Mud­dy Creek, Greene Co., PA — 1823, Grave Creek, Mar­shall Co., VA) m. Hen­ry B. Swan]
i. [Unknown, but pos­si­bly Nan­cy Agnes Crea (1750, Mud­dy Creek, Greene Co., PA — 1791, Dunkard, Greene Co., PA) m. Thomas Bowen]

What’s excit­ing about this is that look­ing at my mater­nal line again, I picked up the trail of my 3rd great grand­moth­er, Esther Ward.

I had not been search­ing wide­ly enough for her. Her hus­band Paul Ward appears in the 1850 Mar­shall Coun­ty, Vir­ginia Mor­tal­i­ty Sched­ule, and I had not been able to find her in the cen­sus for Mar­shall Coun­ty, Vir­ginia, where Paul was list­ed. She did­n’t appear in Vir­ginia at all, in fact, or in oth­er near­by states.

I did­n’t find her in Vir­ginia or oth­er local states because she had moved to Danville, Iowa, and she was incor­rect­ly indexed (as “Hes­ter Ansell”).

But tonight, I found her in the 1850 Cen­sus in Danville Town­ship, Des Moines Co., Iowa, with what I strong­ly believe are her par­ents, as well as her chil­dren Eliz­a­beth, Rollin, Joseph, Helen, and Paul. (I had known about Rollin, Helen, and Paul, and their ages are all on tar­get.) On Ancestry.com, this is linked with the extra infor­ma­tion, though none of has any sources cit­ed, so it is all con­jec­tur­al at this point, but some­thing to start with, if only to rule it out when the doc­u­ments come in.)

All of this led to find­ing Sarah and her hus­band Joseph Ward in the tran­scrip­tion of the Blake­way Ceme­tery, Danville Town­ship, Des Moines Coun­ty, Iowa on the US Gen Web site for Des Moines Coun­ty, Iowa.

So, it’s been an inter­est­ing night! But back to Randy’s oth­er ques­tion.

2. Yes, I have had my mito­chon­dr­i­al DNA done.

I’m in the H hap­logroup, along with “about 30% of all mito­chon­dr­i­al lin­eages in Europe [today]”, accord­ing to Charles Ker­ch­n­er’s MtD­NA Hap­logroup Descrip­tions & Infor­ma­tion Links. I have had some close match­es, but noth­ing that made any genealog­i­cal sense. This is main­ly because the gran­u­lar­i­ty of MtD­NA hap­logroups is such that you can only see deep ances­try, long before genealog­i­cal records or even most of what we think of as our nation­al ori­gins.

Now, if you hap­pened to he in the H2a5 sub­clade of the H hap­logroup, you would know that your fam­i­ly prob­a­bly “orig­i­nat­ed” in the Basque region of what is now Spain.

Of course, we all know that our ori­gins lie in Africa, even if we have the admix­ture, I recent­ly men­tioned here, with Homo sapi­ens nean­derthalen­sis, the Nean­derthals… who prob­a­bly also came from Africa.

Even stat­ing all that, though, I still find mtD­NA inter­est­ing, as one finds out facts such as that the H hap­logroup is promi­nent in Europe, but also by the Caspi­an Sea. We think of migra­tions in terms of our recent his­to­ry, but human migra­tion is a much longer trend, from Africa to the Caspi­an to Europe to Amer­i­ca: we just keep mov­ing.

I came across an inter­est­ing web­site called Diigo.com. It is a com­bi­na­tion of a social book­mark­ing site, such as Delicious.com, and a note tak­ing, web con­tent stor­age site, such as Evernote.com.

Diigo allows you to store book­marks from across the web, tag them with mul­ti­ple tags, and share these links with oth­ers. You can also mark book­marks as pri­vate, in case you do not want to share them, or you can post them to par­tic­u­lar groups of users in the social net­work of Diigo.com.

While Delicious.com is a pow­er­ful tool, one thing it lacks is a true social com­po­nent, where users could cre­ate inter­est groups to share links with­in the group, not sim­ply based on tags. The Ever­note desk­top appli­ca­tion and its com­pan­ion site Evernote.com are one of the most use­ful sites for gath­er­ing togeth­er notes, images, snip­pets of web­pages, and so on. Ever­note allows you to col­lect con­tent in note­books, and share con­tent on a note­book-by-note­book basis. Note­books can be shared with indi­vid­u­als or with the world. But there’s no way in Ever­note to cre­ate groups, join groups, and share with oth­er users who have a com­mon inter­est.

Where Diigo.com real­ly shines is in its focus on research. As you tra­vers­es the web, you can store URLs, save text and files (web pages as well as images and PDFs), and high­light and anno­tate them. These notes and anno­ta­tions can be shared with the social net­work on the Diigo.com site, mak­ing it what what the folks at Diigo call “a col­lab­o­ra­tive research plat­form.” As opposed to a social net­work about every­thing, includ­ing games, and so on, like Face­book, the folks at Diigo say their site is a “social infor­ma­tion net­work.” It has been rec­og­nized by the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion of School Librar­i­ans (AASL) as one of The Best Web­sites for Teach­ing and Learn­ing.

There are tool­bars avail­able for Fire­fox and Inter­net Explor­er, a one-but­ton exten­sion avail­able for Chrome, and a book­mark but­ton for Fire­fox, Inter­net Explor­er, and Safari. There is some sup­port for the iPhone, but it seems a bit clunky.

I have cre­at­ed an account on Diigo.com and will try it out.

I don’t expect it to replace Evernote.com or Delicious.com, as it’s in a slight­ly dif­fer­ent mar­ket than those prod­ucts. (By the way, there’s an inte­gra­tion with Delicious.com from Diigo.com, allow­ing you to post the links you cre­ate on Diigo.com to your Delicious.com account.). The lack of an offline tool, such as what Ever­note has, means that I would not be able to take notes where wi-fi is not avail­able, but I see a lot of val­ue in Diigo.com, espe­cial­ly for the ease of shar­ing research mate­ri­als with oth­er mem­bers of a research com­mu­ni­ty.

The sci­ence mag­a­zine Nature has pub­lished an arti­cle that claims to prove that Euro­peans and Asians have traces of Nean­derthal DNA: “Euro­pean and Asian genomes have traces of Nean­derthal.”

Svante Pääbo leads a team of sci­en­tists at the Max Planck Insti­tute for Evo­lu­tion­ary Biol­o­gy in Leipzig. They have been sequenc­ing the DNA of Nean­derthal bones found in Vin­di­ja Cave in Croa­t­ia. When they com­plet­ed their ini­tial work on the Nean­derthal DNA a year ago, the sci­en­tists want­ed to com­pare the Nean­derthal DNA to sequenced DNA of mod­ern indi­vid­u­als. Their sam­ple mod­ern DNA came from peo­ple in France, Africa, Chi­na, and Papua New Guinea.

What they found was that 1–4% of the DNA of Euro­peans and Asians comes from Nean­derthals. This was not true of Africans. Their esti­mate is that migrat­ing humans in Europe and Asia Minor inter­bred with Nean­derthals 45,000 to 80,000 years ago.

Talk about deep geneal­o­gy!

There will be a lot of fur­ther research into the impli­ca­tions of this par­tial ances­try of humans from near cousins in the dis­tant past. Are there any traits or vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties or sur­vival strengths some of us come to because of this ances­try? There will be much to pon­der as the research results are com­plet­ed.

I post­ed a film yes­ter­day about a woman dis­cov­er­ing infor­ma­tion about her great grand­moth­er who lived in what was called the Kalau­pa­pa (Moloka’i) Lep­rosy Set­tle­ment. Wikipedia has this to say about Kalau­pa­pa:

The coun­ty is coex­ten­sive with the Kalau­pa­pa Nation­al His­tor­i­cal Park, and encom­pass­es the Kalau­pa­pa Set­tle­ment where the King­dom of Hawaiʻi, the ter­ri­to­ry, and the state once exiled per­sons suf­fer­ing from lep­rosy (Hansen’s dis­ease) begin­ning in the 1860s. The quar­an­tine pol­i­cy was lift­ed in 1969, after the dis­ease became treat­able on an out­pa­tient basis and could be ren­dered non-con­ta­gious. How­ev­er, many of the res­i­dent patients chose to remain, and the state has promised they can stay there for the rest of their lives. No new patients, or oth­er per­ma­nent res­i­dents, are admit­ted. Vis­i­tors are only per­mit­ted as part of offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned tours. State law pro­hibits any­one under the age of 16 from vis­it­ing or liv­ing there. With a pop­u­la­tion of 147 at the 2000 cen­sus, Kalawao Coun­ty’s pop­u­la­tion is the sec­ond small­est of any coun­ty in the Unit­ed States, ahead of only Lov­ing Coun­ty, Texas. Ranked by medi­an house­hold income, it is the poor­est coun­ty in the Unit­ed States.

(Source: Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalawao : Accessed 5 May 2010)

Peo­ple who are look­ing into ances­tors who lived in Kalau­pa­pa do not have a lot of resources. If you are doing fam­i­ly his­to­ry in this locale, here are some places you could try:

• Hawai‘i State Archives, Geneal­o­gy Research Guide (which includes some dig­i­tized vital records)
• Linkpendi­um > Geneal­o­gy > USA > Hawaii and the Pacif­ic > Kalawao Coun­ty
• US Gen­Web Archives for Kalawao
• Remem­ber­ing Kalau­pa­pa
• Kalawao Coun­ty HI Gen­Web
• Fam­i­ly His­to­ry Library Micro­film from the Church of St. Fran­cis of Asis­si, one reel, includ­ing:
  

  Bap­tisms 1927–1964, 1978 (FHL US/CAN Film 1025712 Item 1)
  Mar­riages 1896–1909, 1927–1977 (FHL US/CAN Film 1025712 Item 2–3)
  Con­fir­ma­tions 1927–1975 (FHL US/CAN Film 1025712 Item 4)
  Church accounts 1889–1891 Deaths 1904–1927 (FHL US/CAN Film 1025712 Item 5)
  Deaths 1927–1977 (FHL US/CAN Film 1025712 Item 6)
  Reg­is­ter 1873–1930 (pho­to­copy of orig.) (bap­tisms, con­fir­ma­tions, mar­riages, buri­als) (FHL US/CAN Film 1025712 Item 7)

I want to talk to you about “Search­ing for Emma.” It was one of the most affect­ing of a group of poignant films pre­sent­ed at “A Cel­e­bra­tion of Fam­i­ly His­to­ry” on 29 April pre­sent­ed by Fam­il­y­Search at the LDS Con­fer­ence Cen­ter in hon­or of the 2010 Nation­al Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety con­fer­ence.

The film depicts the sto­ry of Emma Lyons Waimau, exiled at the age of 24 to Kalau­pa­pa, what was then called the colony for lep­ers (per­sons with Hansen’s Dis­ease) on the island of Moloka’i. There, she met and mar­ried her hus­band and bore six chil­dren none of whom she would be able to keep, accord­ing to the laws of the day.

Fam­i­ly his­to­ry is sim­ply the sto­ry of lives as they are lived, with hap­pi­ness and tragedy deliv­ered as they will be, with­out a sched­ule or agen­da. What moves is how peo­ple react to the lives they live.

The dev­as­ta­tion of the Hawai’ian peo­ple, the stigma­ti­za­tion of peo­ple with a dis­ease, and the whole his­to­ry of health care, inform this sto­ry of Emma Lyons Waimau and infuse it with mean­ing. Each aspect of the nar­ra­tive adds the weight of his­to­ry to a tale that might oth­er­wise be sim­ply a per­son­al one of a woman curi­ous to know about her great grand­moth­er’s strug­gles.

“Search­ing for Emma” (Adobe Flash-based video)