ROOTS- FINDING YOUR STORY Newsletter- January 28, 2023

27 Jan ROOTS- FINDING YOUR STORY Newsletter- January 28, 2023

ROOTS- TWO LEAVES AND A LIE

Ancestry.com has a new game show on You Tube (link below)

In the first episode Sarah Hyland, better known as Haley Dunphy in Modern Family and her husband Wells Adams, better known as a contender on The Bachelorette try to best the other on fictional family history like the Dunphy’s extended family, and their real families.

In the scene above, Wells is stumped when he thinks his ancestor fought in the Civil War, but it was in the Revolutionary War., so he could join the Sons of the American Revolution. Dancestors helps people complete the documentation and application for memberships in the SAR, DAR, and other societies related to their heritage.

That also gave me the opportunity to include a picture of my grandson who is a qualified candidate for the SAR, and an American patriot in the newsletter. Can you guess which one is him, and which is Mel Gibson? Bonus points if you know the other two actors.

ROOTS- ONLY ONE PRESIDENT EVER PAID OFF THE NATIONAL DEBT

In January 1835, President Andrew Jackson paid off the national debt, the only time in U.S. history it had been accomplished. It was paid down through tariff revenues, carefully managing federal funding of internal improvements like roads and canals, ] and the sale of public lands. Between 1834 and 1836, the government had an unprecedented spike in land sales: At its peak in 1836, the profits from land sales were eight to twelve times higher than a typical year. During Jackson’s presidency, 63 million acres of public land—about the size of the state of Oklahoma—was sold.

Many people were unhappy with his high-handedness with what was viewed as a congressional authority, and he was censured for a series of actions involving the nation’s finances. The cartoon attempted to reflect his detractor’s views of his approach.

Down below, I came across this graph of “Congressional Productivity,” which was interesting. Everyone can reach their own conclusions on what it shows.

ROOTS- THAT’S THE BEST THE OHIO CAN COME UP WITH?

ROOTS – THE LAS VEGAS, LAS VEGAS HOTEL AND CASINO IN NEW YORK CITY

With New York State considering allowing casinos in New York City, I thought since Vegas has the “New York, New York” Hotel and Casino, should not New York have the “Las Vegas, Las Vegas” Hotel and Casino.

Since I could not find a picture of such a thing. So, I thought this a good time to try out Dall-e a deep learning model developed by OpenAI to generate digital images from natural language descriptions.

I started with the title as a description, and that made no sense. I finally simplified it down to “New York City casino” and got the drawing above.

I am not clear what the words on the hotel mean, but at least it sort of looks like a hotel and casino. I think rendering artists won’t have to lose sleep for a while.

ROOTS- CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET DOCUMENTS

With everyone but us having classified documents under the kitchen sink, I thought I would check old newspapers and see when the works “classified top secret” started being used. It turned out that there was a lot of that being used around the Pearl Harbor attack.
The next reference to “classified documents” were the Pentagon Papers released by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971.

ROOTS- WHAT WAS THE FIRST LLC “LIMITED LIABILITY CORPORATION”?

The East India Company (EIC) (picture of their headquarters at right) was an English and later British joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia) and later with East Asia. The company seized control of parts of the Indian subcontinent and colonized parts of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong.

Its shareholders were 218 merchants. Yet crucially – and unusually – the charter granted those merchants limited liability for the company’s actions.

Why was that so important? Because otherwise, investors were personally liable for everything the business did.

If you partnered in a business that ran up debts it couldn’t pay, its debtors could come after you – not just for the value of your investment, but for everything you owned.

How we invest today – buying shares in companies whose managers we will never meet – would be unthinkable. And that would severely limit the amount of capital a business venture could raise.

ROOTS- THE FIRST INDIVIDUAL LLC CAME ABOUT IN 1977 IN WYOMING AND DIDN’T EXIST IN ALL 50 STATES UNTIL 1996

The first state to enact a law authorizing the creation of limited liability companies was Wyoming in 1977. The law was a project of the Hamilton Brothers Oil Company, which sought to organize its business in the United States with liability and tax advantages similar to those it had obtained in Panama.
From 1960 to 1997, the classification of unincorporated business associations for U.S. federal income tax law was governed by the “Kintner regulations,” which were named after the prevailing taxpayer in the 1954 legal precedent of that name as promulgated by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in 1960, the Kintner regulations set forth a complex six-factor test for determining whether such business associations would be taxed as corporations or partnerships. However, some of these factors had equal significance, so the presence of only half of them would result in classification as a partnership. Accordingly, the Wyoming Legislature tailored its statute to grant LLCs particular corporate features without exceeding this threshold.
For several years, other states were slow to adopt the LLC form because it was unclear how the IRS and courts would apply the Kintner regulations. However, after the IRS finally decided in 1988 in Revenue Ruling 88-76 that Wyoming LLCs were taxable as partnerships, other states began to take the LLC seriously and enacted their LLC statutes. By 1996, all 50 states had LLC statutes. In 1995, the IRS concluded that the widespread enactment of LLC statutes had undermined the Kintner regulations, and in 1996 it promulgated new rules establishing a so-called “check the box” (CTB) entity classification election system that went into effect throughout the United States on January 1, 1997.

ROOTS- A LONDON FURNITURE CONSERVATOR EXPLAINS ICE AGE CAVE PAINTINGS

Ben Bacon analyzed 20,000-year-old markings on the drawings, concluding they could refer to a lunar calendar.

It led to a specialist team proving early Europeans made notes about the timing of animals’ reproductive cycles.

Mr. Bacon said it was “surreal” to work out for the first-time what hunter-gatherers were saying.

Cave paintings of animals such as reindeer, fish and cattle have been found in caves across Europe.

But archaeologists had been stumped by the meaning of dots and other marks on the paintings. So, Mr. Bacon decided he would try to decode them.

Here’s the rest of the story:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64162799

ROOTS- YOUR ANCESTORS ARE WAITING TO BE DISCOVERED!

Reach out to Dancestors and let us research, discover, and preserve your family history. No one is getting any younger, and stories disappear from memory every year and eventually from our potential ability to find them. Paper gets thrown in the trash; books survive! So do not hesitate and call me @ 214-914-3598.