La très catastrophique visite du zoo

Joël Dicker

Description

The book is the story of one branch of mitochondrial DNA (A2h1). Each woman has been sourced through public documents, US censuses, church records, land and deed records, a couple of wills, and Spanish and Mexican archives. To figure out what the country was like during the lifetime of each woman, I have relied on contemporaneous accounts: Pike, Abert and Emory of the US, Benavides and de Miera of Spain/New Spain. For the most part, I have let facts speak for themselves. Only in the case of Yumar have I exceeded events, but what happened to her was so drastic, so devastating, that I feel justified in what I wrote.

It is a personal book. Don't buy it unless you are interested in looking up your family and have run out of options of where to find them. Then check with your genealogical society. A lot of them, especially in the Southwest, have been given the book. If that fails, it should be online. So, look up Mesquites and Quelites and see if you can find some of your women written up in my account. There are only thirteen but those thirteen go back into the past for four hundred years and you might tie one of them into that blank spot in your family tree.

Another reason to read Mesquites and Quelites is if you are wrestling with people who didn't want to be who they were. Mine was the first generation, and my daughter told me that I would never find my mother's married name and her parents' names on the same page. Oh, but I did. It was a 1944 application for a social security card. Balance that against the death certificate of my mother which states her birth in Kansas of different parents. Well, the clerk looking it up in Topeka said that with that much detail, her birth certificate should have been located, but it wasn't there. Yeah, I caught his meaning. Anyone can say anything even on public documents. It is possible to thread your way past that type of obstacle. You need three primary sources consistent with each other or an unimpeachable document. Mesquites and Quelites is a how-to book, a book for encouragement when you feel that paper and DNA will never bring you to the desired destination of knowing who you are.

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