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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.
Many in search of their family trees find themselves drowning in an endless paper trail. Genealogy used to be a matter of dusty records, family Bibles and ship manifests. And frustrated by dim memories, distant archives, faded records and unidentified photos, more than a few have put the search aside for another day.
SALT LAKE CITY—Sixty-one years ago, Northwest Airlines Flight 4422 smashed into Alaska’s Mount Sanford, killing all 24 passengers — merchant marines returning to the U.S. from China — and six crew members aboard. The wreck of the DC-4 was presumed to have been buried in snow and swallowed into a glacier. For nearly 50 years, no debris or remains were found.