A number of new bloggers made their début on Vita Brevis during the first half of 2015. Tricia Labbe, of the Society’s Membership Services team, wrote in February about breaking through a brick wall on her father’s mother’s family, the Dionnes:
“When I began working at NEHGS in 2014, I realized that staff experts might help me uncover questions relating to my Dionne family line. Continue reading New voices at Vita Brevis
Every so often it seems worthwhile to look back over the wide range of Vita Brevis posts and bring some related ones together in one spot. Now that we are half way through the calendar year, some posts on international genealogical research merit a second look. In January, Eileen Pironti wrote about “Reconnecting with family”: in her case, her Irish family in County Roscommon: Continue reading International research posts at Vita Brevis
In my last post on photographs, I wrote about three unknown subjects who sat for some of the leading Hollywood photographers of the day, and readers weighed in with suggestions about who these men might be as well as where to look for answers as to their identity. In today’s post, I wanted to try something a little different, especially as I could use a photo I’ve been longing to show off: these two photos, again taken by well-known photographers of the early sound era, show three film stars doing a bit of modeling for their studios. Continue reading Marking the 4th of July
A number of years ago I read a passage in a book on the British aristocracy that has stayed with me, a passage having little to do with peers and their families and quite a lot to do with how we all can look at our ancestors. The author, the late Richard “Dickie” Buckle, proposed the temporal impossibility that all of his great-great-grandparents might have met in a room in London about the year 1800, and with this rough structure he mused about who they were – and whether they might have known one another.
For my purposes, the year 1875 works best, although my sixteen great-great-grandparents were not all alive at that date. Continue reading An experiment in time and place
Back in October I wrote about a mysterious photo in my collection of Hollywood photographs, one taken by Eugene Robert Richee of a plainly-dressed woman wearing a rather splendid hat. Photographer and studio names are given on the back, but the sitter is not identified; that post garnered a number of suggested identifications for the subject, including Olivia de Havilland, Ann Sheridan, and Barbara Stanwyck.
Since then, I have bought a number of photographs of “Old Hollywood” sitters, sometimes with the idea of having the photographer (where identified) represented in the collection; in those cases I haven’t worried much about the photos’ subjects. In thinking about these images recently, I thought they might serve as a test case on what old portrait photographs can tell us about their subjects’ identities, starting with the date the image was made. Continue reading More object lessons
In the small world department, one of my closest friends growing up still lives near my parents on the North Shore of Boston. We grew up hearing our parents and grandparents call each other cousin, but no one could readily sort out the connection – in our case, it was via my step-grandmother’s first husband, which means that Franz was really a connection, a cousin of my (step) first cousins! Continue reading A small world
When I was born, I had two living great-grandmothers. The elder was my matrilineal great-grandmother, Pauline (Boucher) Glidden (1875–1964), whom I never had the chance to meet; the other was my paternal grandmother’s stepmother, Annabelle May (Phillips) (Ayer) Whistler (1906–2000), who outlived my great-grandfather by more than forty years and died when I was an adult. I met her only once, but I still think of her often, as I have the dining room set from her house in Florida!
My approach to research, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is to look at collateral relatives as much as I look at my direct ancestry. Continue reading Overlapping generations
One of the mysteries of the Regina Shober Gray diary is why it came to be part of the NEHGS collection. It is an account of daily (or weekly) life, written between January 1860 and December 1884, and for many of the volumes Mrs. Gray is observant about the relationships of her friends and acquaintances, but far less interested, evidently, in the genealogy of the Shober, Gray, and Clay families.
That all changes, however, in March 1874, at tea with one of her nieces: Continue reading A Victorian genealogist
During my recent sabbatical, I made a visit to Jacksonville, Florida, to see one of my great-grandfather’s earliest commissions, the 1902 Mercantile Exchange Bank (today the Old Florida National – or Marble – Bank). I reached Jacksonville during a torrential downpour, although the skies cleared (briefly), allowing me to take photos of the building as it stands today. Continue reading Accidental geography
The birth of the new Princess of Cambridge marks the latest addition to the main line of the British royal family: that is, the line closest in succession to the Queen. For their daughter, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have chosen a mix of historic family names (Charlotte and Elizabeth) and names hallowed by association (Elizabeth and Diana).
Charlotte: The young princess’s most notable predecessors were Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744–1818), wife of King George III, and her granddaughter, the unhappy Princess Charlotte of Wales (1796–1817). In the way of European royal families, this previous Princess Charlotte was both the first cousin (paternally) and maternal aunt (by marriage) of Queen Victoria, the matriarch of the modern British royal family, from whom Princess Charlotte of Cambridge is twice descended through her paternal great-grandparents, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Continue reading The royal baby’s names