On Tuesday, NEHGS announced the first fruits of an historic collaboration with the Archdiocese of Boston, one where – over a period of years – Archdiocesan records will be digitized and made available on the NEHGS website, AmericanAncestors.org. In the fullness of time, this collaboration will preserve and make accessible unique records to tell the stories of some 10 million people from the earliest days of the Catholic community in Massachusetts through the twentieth century. These records are key because they often include events not captured in civil registrations. Whether because of a home birth or a conscious decision not to report an event to a civil authority, these documents might include the only written record for a birth or a death. Their importance and value cannot be overstated. Continue reading An historic collaboration
All posts by Ryan Woods
A Historic Collaboration with FamilySearch
Last week a group of NEHGS staff members joined 22,000 attendees at the 2015 RootsTech Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, for four days of learning, research, and fun. At the keynote session of the conference, NEHGS and FamilySearch made a historic announcement: a multi-year collaboration between the two nonprofit organizations to share data, digitize new records, and work to build an online family tree experience for NEHGS constituents. Continue reading A Historic Collaboration with FamilySearch
Fifty years on Newbury Street
On 14 December 1964, NEHGS opened its doors to members at 99–101 Newbury Street for the very first time. The building on Newbury Street is the Society’s seventh home since it was founded in 1845, and this location has served as our headquarters during the greatest period of growth in our history. In the fifty years since arriving in the Back Bay, our membership has increased from 3,000 to an active constituency of more than 70,000; our library print collections have grown from 30,000 volumes to more than 250,000 volumes; and our endowment has improved from approximately $1 million to more than $25 million.
Banks’ Planters of the Commonwealth
In genealogical research, discovering the names of ships on which immigrant ancestors came to the New World is interesting not only as a discrete fact, but because it can often be a clue for further research. As there was a tendency for members of communities to travel together, knowing the names of ships and the places of origin of the ships’ passengers is helpful in understanding the composition of communities and revealing where to search for related, elusive ancestors.
Unlike more modern listings of passengers for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, compiled by the shipping companies in official ship manifests for departures and arrivals, for the seventeenth century no such official ship passenger lists were created. Continue reading Banks’ Planters of the Commonwealth
Middlesex County probate records now online
Middlesex County was created on 10 May 1643 as one of the original four counties of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The other original counties were Essex, Suffolk, and a now extinct Norfolk – a name later reused for a different geographic region in the state.
At its founding, Middlesex County covered a broad swath of Massachusetts. The county was bordered to the north by New Hampshire, to the east by Essex County, to the south by Suffolk County, and to the west by New York – until Hampshire County was created in 1662. Continue reading Middlesex County probate records now online
A serendipitous reunion
One fall weekend in 2008 my wife, Karen, and I were visiting her parents at their home on Long Island. After dinner one evening, my mother-in-law asked if I might like to see a collection of journals kept by her maternal grandfather, Glenn Welmer Douglass (1884–1968), a Methodist minister from New England.
“Of course!” I said. Continue reading A serendipitous reunion