Category Archives: Collections

Sitting pretty

Collections, Family Stories, News, , , ,

Sitting in an estate of 10,000 acres, Castle Howard is generally considered the finest private residence in Yorkshire and the first great British house of the eighteenth century. Built to the designs of Sir John Vanbrugh, one of England’s greatest architects, for Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, the house cost the immense sum of £78,000 (approximately £154 million in inflation-adjusted values) and is noted for its great dome, the first on a private house in Britain. Continue reading Sitting pretty →

‘An ornament to the city’

American History, NEHGS Collections, ,

Regina Shober Gray by [Edward L.] Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
The third and final entry in the Regina Shober Gray[1] diary on the death of her sister Lizzie[2] turns from private grief to the public response to the news.

61 Bowdoin Street, Boston, Wednesday, 13 December 1865: We think now that Lizzie began weeks ago to realize or at least to fear her sickness was a mortal one. While we continued to hope her exhaustion was largely due to nervous depression and would pass off with the nausea, she was sadly conscious of the inward sapping of the springs of life, and her thoughts instinctively dwelt upon ideas of death & burial. She roused from a doze some weeks since, and said “I have had a vision – you will laugh at me, and say it was a dream – but I saw Wesley & Joseph” (my brother’s two men-servants) “come along the entry and into the room with the tressels which were used for John,[3] and set them down here, saying, ‘They must be ready for Miss Lizzie.’”

“Oh, honey,” said Sallie [Shober],[4] who was with her, “of course it was a dream, you are so restless & feverish.” Continue reading ‘An ornament to the city’ →

Revisiting a classic

Collections, Family Stories, Genealogical Writing, ,
Father and daughter, ca. 1988.

I have a distinct memory of my dad picking me up from daycare and presenting me with two of the loveliest books I had ever seen: The World of Christopher Robin and The World of Pooh, by A.A. Milne. At the time, my dad was a member of Quality Paperback Book Club, a division of Book of the Month Club. Members were required to purchase a certain number of books each year. There was a monthly mailing, but members did not have to make a purchase each month. Quality paperbacks indeed – the books were large with many cream-colored pages, and my dad had gotten them with the intention of reading them to me. I was bursting with happiness. Continue reading Revisiting a classic →

Pictures from “home”

Collections, Technology, , , ,

I just received my order of two copies of a lovely 2019 calendar from Wales (one for me and one for my brother). It is illustrated with paintings of village life in Wales by Welsh artist Valeriane LeBlond (www.valeriane-leblond.eu). The calendar text is in Welsh, so I can’t translate the titles, but the scenes include little white cottages with quilts hung out to air (even in the snow), row houses exactly like those I know my ancestors lived in, bucolic landscapes – this is the southern part of Wales, great farming country – with wind-whipped waves off shore. Neat stuff. Continue reading Pictures from “home” →

ICYMI: Boston riches

American History, Genealogical Writing, ICYMI, NEHGS Collections, , , ,

[Author’s note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 23 February 2017.]

Hedwiga Regina Shober Gray diary, entries for 5-7 February 1864. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections

As I complete publishing excerpts from the 1865 volume, the final year in what I hope will be a single-volume account of the Civil War in the Hedwiga Regina Shober Gray diary, it seems like a good time to revisit a Gray diary primer from 2017.

Certain diaries, and their authors, become short-hand for a time and place: Samuel Pepys’s diary of seventeenth-century London, for example, or Anne Frank’s diary of wartime Amsterdam. The diaries of Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong are often invoked to cover the first half of the nineteenth century in New York; for the Civil War years, readers turn to Mary Boykin (Miller) Chesnut’s Diary from Dixie (1905). Continue reading ICYMI: Boston riches →

‘Aching hearts’

American History, Family Stories, NEHGS Collections,

Regina Shober Gray by [Edward L.] Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
The death of the diarist’s sister Lizzie Shober[1] fills pages in her manuscript diary.[2] Here, in the second installment (of three), Mrs. Gray gathers memories and impressions of her sister’s recent deathbed:

61 Bowdoin Street, Boston, Tuesday, 12 December 1865: On Wednesday, Nov. 30, 1864, we laid our dear brother John[3] in the quiet church yard at St. James the less.[4] He died on Sunday the 27th. Just one year from that sad day, the darling of all our hearts, my sister Lizzie, lay at the last gasp apparently – and though she rallied for a few days of inexpressible comfort to us all, she too left us on Friday Dec 1st and was laid by his side, on just such a soft Indian summer [day] as we had for him, on Monday, Dec. 4th, 1865. She was so wasted and altered that I can not realize yet, that it was our bright cheery Lizzie we left there.

It was Suffering & Death we laid in the cold dark tomb, not our darling; even the profile was unnatural, all the sweet smiling lines, drawn & rigid – and the plain hair, parted back like a child’s, and cut short, for its length & weight distressed her so, looked so unlike the rich full puffs, every wave of which caught such a rich golden auburn glow, upon its lovely chestnut brown. Continue reading ‘Aching hearts’ →

Volunteer appreciation

American History, Collections, Genealogical Writing, Research Methods, Technology, ,
Volunteer Dianne Wesselhoeft uses a static dissipating brush to collect the pieces of paper and dust from the gutter of a Saint Patrick volume.

I started at NEHGS as a volunteer, coming in every Friday for about four hours. My first project involved checking the transcriptions of the names that other volunteers had made against other sources to help decipher some of the names. Often this involved me running up to the fifth floor, where the local histories are kept, or 7, where the genealogies are, to check spellings. After a few weeks I was familiar enough with the handwriting that I did not have to go use outside sources to verify the transcription. Not long afterwards, I began scanning a manuscript for Special Collections and then, as I was in library school at the time, working with actual collections and providing additional details for finding aids. Continue reading Volunteer appreciation →

‘Rest & be comfortable’

American History, NEHGS Collections, ,

Regina Shober Gray by [Edward L.] Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
The death of the diarist’s sister Lizzie Shober[1] is the subject of three diary entries – among the longest passages in the Regina Shober Gray[2] diary, and closing out the year 1865. In these entries Mrs. Gray approaches her subject directly and obliquely, focusing on different moments in Lizzie’s last days as she tries to make sense of the Shober family’s loss.

In her characterization of her younger sister, Mrs. Gray sketches out a Victorian ideal of a maiden lady: “She was pre-eminently the sun shine of her home – the darling sister to each one of us; enjoying all bright, glad things in life, with keenest zest, interested in the smallest details if they were able to pleasure others, ready with quickest sympathies in joys as in sorrows & anxieties – always hopeful if hope were possible, and efficient in all things; at all times considerate & thoughtful for others, self-forgetting, loving, and most lovable.” Continue reading ‘Rest & be comfortable’ →

The only existing record

American History, Collections, Research Methods, Technology, , , ,
St. Patrick’s Church in Lowell. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

As a volunteer at NEHGS, my current assignment is to proofread and potentially correct the indexed records of the Massachusetts: Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston Records, 1789-1900 collection. If you have taken a look at this database, you’ll know that the handwriting in the records varies from “very clear” to “indecipherable.” We have even made use of a “Transcription Challenge,” where we post names from the scanned record book pages and ask users what they think the handwriting represents. Not too surprisingly, the suggested names vary quite a bit amongst themselves.

Contributing to the confusion is that many of the given (first) names in the collection are expressed in Latin form. In other words, the name “Guillimus McCarthy” represents “William McCarthy” in English. Continue reading The only existing record →

‘A source of pleasure and profit’

American History, Family Stories, NEHGS Collections,

Regina Shober Gray by [Edward L.] Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
In this entry, Regina Shober Gray[1] touches on some of the constraints she felt as a poor relation in a family with richer members. Her economies with seamstresses had repercussions for her health and relationship with her children; both of these worries weave like durable threads through many of her diary entries over the years. In the first paragraph of the following entry Mrs. Gray refers to her four sons: Frank, Sam, Regie, and Morris Gray.[2]

61 Bowdoin Street, Boston, Sunday, 12 November 1865: Frank & Sam are both ailing and both studying too hard. We try to hold them back and they declare they are not hurting themselves – both look poorly though. Regie keeps pretty well – and is improving in Latin & French wonderfully but is behind hand in Arithmetic. Morris too improves in every way – especially in Writing. They are all bright enough, if only their health hold out. Continue reading ‘A source of pleasure and profit’ →