OK, I’m a city girl … if you count Shreveport, LA, located in northwest Louisiana (aka East Texas) as “city.” I learned some good rural stuff, though, at Camp Fern, Marshall, Harrison Co., TX. I was a camper or a counselor there for a decade.
FYI, Harrison County, Texas is home to all four poisonous snakes resident to the US of A: water moccasins, rattlesnakes, copperheads, and coral snakes.
In my ten summers at Camp Fern, I saw them all. Nobody was ever bitten in all that time. I came to accept snakes as fellow occupants of God’s good green earth. Sometime in the late 1950s, a copperhead was hanging around on a rock near my cabin. I reported it to my counsellor. “Honey,” she said, “it won’t hurt you if you just don’t poke it with a stick.”
Live and let live: a good piece of advice.
But a snake is still a snake.
I actually remembered my counsellor’s advice with respect to the administrators of a certain FTDNA family DNA project. I failed to follow my gut hunch. Instead, I poked the snake, and wound up being defamed in an email (sent to gosh knows how many people), and two good friends of mine were tossed out of that DNA project for totally meretricious reasons. My friends are understandably upset.
That is a sad story that is probably about power and control. The project administrators in this case are (in my personal opinion) snakes, and they are out of control. That’s a damn shame.
THE PURPOSE OF THIS POST: if you are a member of a family DNA project, make sure that your administrators remain kosher. There are a zillion DNA projects, and FTDNA cannot possibly monitor everything the administrators do (although I think FTDNA does its best). The administrators are all volunteers, and most (in my experience) are committed to furthering family research in their particular family line. Most don’t punish people they don’t like by making up phony reasons to kick them out of a project. However, it is primarily up to us, as project members, to make sure that administrators do their jobs. There is no excuse for administrators to violate FTDNA ethical standards and/or to abuse their power over their members. So please keep an eye on ’em. Poke the snake, if need be. Report them to FTDNA.