WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK: THREE NEW LAMBS. VERNON THE BOAR SEEMS TO BE ENJOYING A SPRING AWAKENING. EGGS CONTINUE TO ABOUND, PLEASE ORDER

The Elusive Moses Margulies Found; Flock Genealogy; Hey All, Troy here.

With another pair of twins joining us this morning, our count has come to twenty four new lambs in 2019 (so far). The growing lamb gang is starting to fill up the limited space we have in our shelters. Able to squeeze into any nook, they go pretty much wherever they like, and there’s nothing the moms or I can do about it. I often see the lambs climb and stand upon older ewes, showing off their spritely youth; meanwhile, the ewes take it stoically, quietly cursing the lambs for stealing their energy in the form of milk. Or so I imagine.As keepers of a heritage breed, we need to pay attention to these newcomers as they start to distinguish themselves from the group. Which ones will make the cut for our next generation of breeding stock, and which ones will be, unfortunately, voted off the island? For ramlings, we have to decide very quickly, because it is not recommended to castrate them after their first week. If we want to keep a ram around to continue our line or to sell as a stud, we have to make the decision before getting much information about his general fitness. We must look to the parents for traits we like that hopefully get passed on to their offspring. We should also know the grandparents, so that we can optimize the flock’s genetic diversity. This is one reason why I highly value archives. It is also why I was excited to comb through all of the old Turkana Farms birth records and add them to our work-in-progress “Spreadsheep.”Mark was happy to support my mission, but not without a bit of warning and apology for the state of their records. He handed over a large binder and several folders brimming with documents and pictures. I gladly accepted them, feeling like I hit a data motherlode. However, I soon learned this was not a simple, copy-paste task, but rather a complex logic puzzle. The data I was eager to uncover was not as clean and clear-cut as I expected: many records were missing, some contradicted each other, and others were simply illegible. This was not a goldmine; it was an archaeological dig. I was excavating the family tree of our flock.My own family as a whole is quite fascinated with genealogy, although my sister, Beth, does most of the digging for us. A natural archivist, she loves to hunt down marriage certificates, census records, visa affidavits, or at the very least, any evidence that two people were in the same village at the same time. However, these prey can be quite wily and elusive at times. In one seemingly straightforward case, Beth tried to find the link between our great grandmother, Eva Margulies, and her supposed cousin Sidney Margulies. The relationship is significant, because Sidney sponsored Eva’s family (which included our grandfather) to immigrate to the U.S. during WWII. It all seems to make sense: they have the same last name, and they claimed to be “cousins.” Well, it turns out actually proving this to be true is rather fraught with dead-ends and misdirections.Trying to find out who Sidney’s parents were, Beth discovered that Sidney actually went by “Osias” before he immigrated to the U.S. in 1920. This Anglicization was a common occurrence for immigrants coming to America as a part of the assimilation process. As it turns out, this was also common for the sheep coming to Turkana Farms as well! In a twist on Anglicization, Mark and Peter would Turkicize the names of rams coming in from other farms. I was thrown when some ewes were registered as being sired by “King” while the birth records showed the same ewes being born to “Kraal.” Apparently, they were the same ram before and after assimilation into Turkana society. At least I can ask Mark when I run into discrepancies like this. Beth instead needs to wade deeper into the document swamp.Beth traced Sidney’s family