Newsroom
‘Tis the Season for giving and receiving, and Record Click readers are about to receive a special gift – an interview with Colleen Fitzpatrick, an internationally acclaimed forensic genealogist. Ms. Fitzpatrick, a Ph.D. and former nuclear physicist, now focuses her genealogical researcher skills on forensic genealogy.
It’s a Holocaust survival story described by the BBC as “one of the most remarkable stories to emerge from World War II.” A documentary on the subject won a slew of awards after it was released in Australia in 2003.
Pressure is mounting on an Australian man to prove that his remarkable Holocaust survival story is true. Alex Kurzem’s story has been told in a bestselling book and an award-winning documentary — both titled The Mascot — but it was the feature that was screened on America’s 60 Minutes in 2009 that roused the suspicions of Dr Barry Resnick, a Californian college professor who lost relatives in the Holocaust.
Barry Resnick, a professor of counseling at Santiago Canyon College, remembers watching an incredible story on “60 Minutes” in 2009. It was about a small boy during World War II who becomes the mascot for Nazi soldiers in Latvia, witnesses their atrocities, and decades later says that he himself is a Jewish survivor of a Nazi massacre.
King County investigators looking for a break in a decades-old slaying of a teen girl might have a new lead. Or, as it happens, a very, very old one. A California forensic consultant has tied DNA found after Federal Way teen Sarah Yarborough was killed to a 17th-century Massachusetts family.
(CNN) —DNA may help Seattle-area sheriff’s deputies find a suspect in a 20-year-old killing after a comparison with genealogy records connected a crime-scene sample to a 17th-century Massachusetts family. The DNA sample was taken in the death of 16-year-old Sarah Yarborough, who was killed on her high school campus in Federal Way, Washington, in December 1991.
The theories keep getting weirder. He’s a victim of 2004’s Hurricane Charley. He’s a musician who supposedly “died” in 1996. He’s man who disappeared while tracking a turtle migration in 2004.
You don’t know me but… That’s how Colleen Fitzpatrick starts many of her phone conversations. Including one to Australia in 2007, looking for relatives of a family that died on the Titanic.
It was a long-shot, but sometimes that’s all you have. Colleen Fitzpatrick was cold-calling Ireland in search of a Drum. An Ellen Drum, born during the Potato Famine.
It’s as if she doesn’t notice the beep-beep-beep of a ground-penetrating radar machine being tested in her kitchen. Or the 80-pound tortoise clomping past her collection of 3-D holograms.