Well, this is surreal. I recently stumbled across what appeared to be an article about me in Vietnamese. The giveaway was my photo (likely snagged from my blog) and the frequent sprinkling of "Smolenyak Smolenyak" amidst a sea of Vietnamese words.
Viết lịch sử nước Mỹ qua ADN
Curious, I asked my amazing assistant, Alyssa Gregory, to see if she could find a Vietnamese-to-English translation tool online and put together a rough translation. She managed to find two and the comical result (with some remarks interspersed by me) follows. How much of this was lost in translation and how much is attributable to other causes, I can't say -- but I think you'll find it entertaining!
Write U.S. history across DNA
[Huh?? Maybe "US History Written in DNA," although the article isn't really about that]
While history can shape and develop a nation, a country might be enlightened in another very interesting way: family trees of patriarchal clans.
[Not sure why just patriarchal]
The U.S.’s premier historian and genealogy-builder is Ms. Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak. She has revealed that Diana is a relative from 11 generations before with U.S. President George Bush. Bush is also a generation 11 relative with Senator Barack Obama, one of the people in the upcoming U.S. president election. Obama is a far relative with actor Brad Pitt, husband of actress Angelina Jolie. Eight generations away from Obama and Pitt is a common tie to Edwin Hickman. And despite Clint Eastwood is American, he and Arnold Schwarzenegger are descents with each other.
[This is obviously giving me way more credit than I'm due. The part's that accurate has to do with Obama. In my capacity as Chief Family Historian for Ancestry.com, I researched the Obama-Pitt connection: Brad Pitt and Barack Obama - long lost cousins. Ancestry.com has shared these other connections in assorted articles and press materials. As I recall, Eastwood and Schwarzenegger are cousins by marriage.]
This was just announced on the web recently, by the force of Ms. Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak. For years Ms. Smolenyak Smolenyak has tried every effort to accomplish the families of many across the U.S.
Every life is interesting
In part this project is already building to go find the ancestor in prison of a grandmother. Ms. Smolenyak Smolenyak, 46 year-old, says it’s a matter of the heart: “I often say to everyone without family, the story which is all together, and the word is fact."
[OK, my best guess here is that I have a tendency to tell folks that there's no such thing as a boring family. And if you're confused about the connection between grandma and prison, so am I.]
Ms. Smolenyak Smolenyak learned in the 1980s, that the grandmother was a graduate of the diplomatic department of the university.
[Given that my undergraduate degree is in Foreign Service, I this is insinuating that I'm my own grandmother.]
"The story can be novel size." She has helped many people draw their family tree, including the grandmother and has become an expert in the U.S.
The four seas is brother
Smolenyak Smolenyak is a leader on the web page ancestry.com and helps people in the world who have a request to look for relatives and establish a family tree. The information archive is of people who register their own name, the name of parent or grandmother, birthday, day of death, day of immigration. Her web page automatically processes and announces some circumstances and information from some joins each other.
Information dovetails
15 million people use the service of this web page, among them 800,000 people pay money to use enhanced service, from 74 USD for every time.
One of the famous discoveries was finding out empress Marie Antoinette of France, she was executed in the French revolution, belonged a group DNA call Haplogroup H together with about half Europe now. CBS television station's television announcer Katie Couric came together with Muliebrity to go back to the same gene as people who lived in ice and snow. After 5,000 years people found human bones in a mountain range in the Alps.
[This is probably referring to the fact that Katie Couric's mtDNA haplogroup is K. Incidentally, while we're on the topic of genetic trivia, so is Stephen Colbert's.]
Also, Seaborn Brinson, the first mayor of the U.S. with black skin, has mother and four brothers and sisters once slaves. Ms. Smolenyak Smolenyak did special research on the topic about black skin in the U.S. "Most everybody, even me, is a descendant from Africa,” Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak says, "and I think everyone will treat each other better when we identify people’s origin.”
[This refers to some research I did for the Cleveland Plain Dealer about Carl Stokes, the first African American mayor of a major U.S. City. I can't find a link for the original article (1845 document connects Stokes family to slavery's grim reality), but most of the content is in this blog posting. I was asked to find out who owned Stokes's great-grandfather, Seaborn Brinson, and learned that it was a woman named Tarver who had married a fellow named William Brinson. And yes, I often mention that Africa is the cradle of mankind.]
By THỦY TÙNG
Side box:
Ms. Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak assembles collectively 101 stories about families in U.S. who find a photograph, certificate sheet or other document.
A tale of someone who suddenly discovers a wife is a relative of five generations, a person who is in a family of someone famous, a woman who finds information about her father who died in war when she was three-months old, and another across the internet has discovered a far away sister.
[I believe this is probably referring to my first book, In Search of Our Ancestors.]
Ms. Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak has widespread success finding family trees and this has caused many people to imitate her and establish other sites that help people look for relatives like Genealogy.com, Myfamily.com, Ancestry.ca. Nevertheless, ancestry.com and Ms. Megan still remain impeccably the first.
[It's kind of funny that Ancestry.com is described as being "impeccably the first," given that all the other examples given are also part of the TGN corporate family, but I understand the intent. As to myself, well, I guess I'll make it a goal to try to one day live up to the high praise this curious article showered on me.]