I was very pleased to have received the Dark Shadows/MPI Snow Globe for Christmas (though I placed the order myself, so it didn't come as a surprise). I will say that at least it's glass - well, acrylic, probably - but not plastic. So it's heavy and the quality seems quite good. I've seen some snow globes recently where the globe was a soft plastic that actually gives if you pick it up by the globe. I like the Collinwood replica although it is very tiny - I should look at it more closely with a magnifying glass. I have not spotted for sure what architectural departure the model has from the real house. It's fun to see Collinwood under snowfall when you shake the globe. I have mixed feelings about the greenish tinge to the snow, though. And the music plays really, really loud. As someone commented elsewhere, I too would have preferred a mechanism music box, but it seems that digital chips are the way many are made now, at least the inexpensive ones. It was the music that brought back memories, though. When I heard "Quentin's Theme," many memories of the show came flooding back.
I've also given thought to Magda, Sandor, and the werewolf curse over the past six months, as I have worked almost obsessively nearly every moment I could on trying to find the gypsy ancestor that my DNA results revealed for the first time. Since then, I have found additional SNPs from India (the origin of the Roma people) in my DNA as well as two rare European SNPs associated with the European Roma. Surprisingly these latter two appear in Sweden and Finland, my mother's heritage, and not my father's French line, as I had expected. Since my mother had agreed some time back to having her DNA tested, I have been able to find conclusively that the Roma/Romany heritage is in her ancestry. One of my testing companies allows me to filter all my DNA matches by specific regions or nationalities (for example, Ashakenzai Jewish, Sephardic Jewish, North African, Southwestern Asia (Iran/Iraq), India, etc.). With this company I have 11 matches with Roma people, all of them in Finland (and all with 25% or greater ancestry from India). That proved conclusively that this was on my mother's side. Interestingly, she has matches with 32 Roma in Finland (called Kaale or Romany there). So a lot of DNA has been lost just between her generation and me. We also have some much weaker links with Romanichal in the U.K. What has taken the most effort, though, is the historical genealogical research since I found only one possible clue in church records around 1800 that I'm still not sure about - and it would mean Romany ancestry in a different line of my mother's family. Where the paper trail intersects with DNA matches goes back to two gypsy families living just north of the Arctic Circle in Lapland in the 1600s. It's little known that gypsies were that far north at that time (one online poster in Finland confidently - but mistakenly - stated that the gypsies didn't get that far north until the railroads went in in the 1800s). But Thesleff, one of the great researchers in the matter, shows in his maps and diagrams that the gypsies were in that area as early as the late 1500s as they made their way from Sweden to Finland over the northern shore of the Gulf of Bothnia. Others came from the South and Russia, and the family name of one of my two families translates as "Russian." According to one researcher, they had lived originally in Armenia. So all of this is very far back and distant, 400 years ago. And knowledge of their existence in my family tree would never have been known were it not for DNA testing. Though interestingly, my grandmother had written a poem about Roma travelers she had seen growing up and a couple of other stories about them had been passed down in the family.
