Category Archives: NEHGS Collections

“An elderly groom”

American History, NEHGS Collections, , ,

PP231.236 Regina Shober Gray. Not dated.
Regina Shober Gray by [Edward L.] Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue mall features monumental statues on most blocks, and the block closest to NEHGS boasts a representation of Alexander Hamilton given to the city by Benjamin Tyler Reed (1801–1874). Mr. Reed, a founder of the Episcopal Theological School, appears with some frequency in Regina Shober Gray’s diary, and it is safe to say that to Mrs. Gray he did not present a very heroic figure.

I’ve already written about Mrs. Gray’s dismay at her friend Mary Coolidge’s engagement to Mr. Reed.[1] The Grays and the Coolidges were close – Mrs. Gray writes on 23 January 1860 of having had “a few minutes racy chat with Mary C.”; in fact, as was usually the case in the Gray diary, Mary Coolidge was also a Gray family connection (as the younger sister of Mrs. Gray’s stepmother’s brother’s sister-in-law).

Boston, 16 April 1860: “An unusually full meeting of the ‘circle’[2] at Mary Coolidge’s, and a very entertaining one too. She was full of spirits and kept us on the broad laugh with her droll way of telling things.” Continue reading “An elderly groom” →

The evolving game of football

American History, NEHGS Collections, , , ,
Walter Camp of Yale
Walter Camp. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

On 6 November 1869, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the Rutgers Queensmen[1] defeated the College of New Jersey[2] Tigers by a score of 6 to 4 in what is regarded as the first college football game ever played.[3] College football would remain a vastly different game from today’s version for the rest of the nineteenth century. The major differences in the game are accentuated in the diary of Harvard College graduate Edward Herbert Atherton of Worcester, Massachusetts, a work available in NEHGS’s R. Stanton Avery Special Collections (Mss A 1665). Continue reading The evolving game of football →

The Governor’s chair

American History, NEHGS Collections, News, Research Methods, ,
Hancock chair 1
Figure 1. The Hancock easy chair with its replaced yellow worsted damask upholstery. The chair is currently on display at the NEHGS Library. Photo by Greg Anthony

In addition to its vast collection of genealogical materials, the New England Historic Genealogical Society houses a fine collection of early American furniture and decorative arts. Scattered throughout the Society’s Newbury Street headquarters are superb examples of eighteenth-century tall case clocks, high chests, and desks. Some of these pieces possess quite interesting provenances, including an easy chair believed to have been owned by eighteenth-century Boston merchant and Massachusetts governor John Hancock (Fig. 1).

According to NEHGS records, the Hancock easy chair originally stood in Hancock’s Beacon Hill home, which he had inherited from his uncle Thomas’ wife, Lydia Henchman, sometime after Thomas’ death in 1764.[i] It is believed that the chair is the “Yellow Damask Easy Chair” listed in John Hancock’s 1793 estate inventory (Fig. 2).[ii] Continue reading The Governor’s chair →

Old genealogies in the digital age

American History, Genealogical Writing, NEHGS Collections, News, ,
Henry Stoddard Ruggles
Portrait of Henry Stoddard Ruggles, author of The Ruggles Family in England and America (1898).

For the past six months, I have been devoting much of my time as Metadata Librarian at NEHGS to making older genealogies from our Boston research library available online in the NEHGS Digital Library and Archive. These genealogies, most of them originally published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are rare or unique to NEHGS, and have not been previously available online.

By adding them to our Digital Library, we hope that we can not only increase access to these hard-to-find resources, but also better preserve the physical books themselves, which are often suffering from the effects of brittle, acidic paper and deteriorating bindings. We have added items ranging from short, privately printed pamphlets – such as the five-page Family and Antecedents of William Henry Rayner and Jeanie Ann Balmer – to longer, more comprehensive treatises, like Henry Stoddard Ruggles’s The Ruggles Family in England and America. Continue reading Old genealogies in the digital age →

2015: the year in review

American History, Family Stories, Genealogical Writing, NEHGS Collections, News, Research Methods, , , , , , ,
scanros1
Meeting cousins in County Roscommon.

Vita Brevis recently marked a milestone, with the publication of its five-hundredth blog post. Early in January 2016, the blog will celebrate its second birthday, and, in a tradition started last year, today and tomorrow I will write about twelve representative posts published in the blog in 2015. With about 250 posts in both 2014 and 2015, Vita Brevis holds a lot of material for readers to sample, and I urge the curious to wend their way through the blog using authors, categories, or tags to navigate.

On 23 January, Eileen Pironti wrote about finding some of her Irish cousins in County Roscommon: Continue reading 2015: the year in review →

The Philadelphia box

American History, Family Stories, NEHGS Collections, , ,
Hedwiga Gray diary1
Hedwiga Regina Shober Gray diary, entries for 5-7 February 1864. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections

In 1860, when Regina Shober Gray began keeping her diary, gift-giving was spread between Christmas and New Year’s Day: indeed, the latter day was the more important of the two in the eyes of the Gray children. For at least the period of the Civil War, the Gray family of Boston impatiently awaited the arrival of “the Philadelphia box” – containing presents from Mrs. Gray’s siblings[1] – with shipment timed for the days around January 1. Continue reading The Philadelphia box →

Research in organizational records

American History, Collections, NEHGS Collections, Research Methods, ,

Temperance signOne of my recent research cases involved searching for information within societies and organizations. It began with searching in newspapers for an 1849 obituary in order to gather more biographical information about my research subject, but I also looked for any references to him in articles and classifieds ads. I first located his death notice, and learned that he was a printer – a compositor of the Boston Transcript. Continue reading Research in organizational records →

Poor relief records

American History, NEHGS Collections, Research Methods, , ,
Sheldon Poor House 1860
Sheldon Poor House Association, 1860. Click on images to expand them.

Vita Brevis readers are likely all too familiar with the problem of brick walls in genealogical research. Many are aware of the uses of probate and estate records, but what if your ancestors are not to be found in the probate records of the area where they died? There can be any number of reasons, for economic conditions in the colonial and early Federal period were often unstable, and a family could find itself experiencing periods of both comfort and destitution at one point or another. Fortunately, there are a number of techniques to track less wealthy ancestors, both in the interest of making family connections and learning something of the reality of their lives. Continue reading Poor relief records →

Quality control

American History, NEHGS Collections, News, Technology, , , ,

Editor’s Note: This is part three of a series on digitizing our special collections. The previous posts can be read here and here.

Abbey Schultz 2Good news! The next phase of our digitization project is under way. We’ve just received the first batch of images from our scanning partner, which means we can begin work on the next step: quality control.

In the last post, I talked about the organizational aspects of digitization – sorting and physically preparing the items, creating a finding aid, and adding instructions when needed to make sure all the documents are scanned correctly. One of the first things we did upon getting the Howard family papers back from our scanning partner was to make sure that the organization was honored and that all of the pages were scanned. Continue reading Quality control →

A grave concern

American History, Collections, NEHGS Collections, ,

Capen stoneOver the past thirty years I have examined thousands of old slate gravestones in the cemeteries of New England. This fascination led me to write A Guide to Massachusetts Cemeteries, which allowed me to determine the oldest cemeteries in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

When I started at NEHGS in 1993, I came across a curious artifact wrapped in butcher block paper in the Society’s archives. For some time NEHGS had been caretaker of the remaining fragments of the seventeenth-century Bernard/Barnard Capen gravestone. It is uncommon to locate fragments from broken gravestones in local historical societies. Continue reading A grave concern →