Category Archives: Collections

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 →

Tracing your African roots at NEHGS

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The Old Plantation
The Old Plantation. Courtesy of Wikimedia.org

From tracing free people of color in New England to identifying former slaves in the deep south, NEHGS can help you tell your family story. We have a number of guides and tools in our library and available through our education department and online databases that can help you jump start researching your African American roots all over the United States, not just New England. Continue reading Tracing your African roots at NEHGS →

Bible studies

American History, Collections, Family Stories, Research Methods, , , , ,

Doerr 1One of the resources every family historian hopes to find and treasure is a family Bible full of handwritten notations of births, marriages, and deaths. These Bibles are often beautiful in themselves for their illuminated pages, or for the well-worn leather covers molded by devoted hands. Not to be overlooked, however, are the enclosures some owners pressed between those pages, enclosures which might yield some of the basic data always sought, and which might also give insight into the owners’ personalities and the events of their daily lives. Continue reading Bible studies →

“A handsome woman in elaborate dress”

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

For the last year or so, I’ve been immersed in the diary of Regina Shober Gray (1818–1885), a Philadelphian who lived on Beacon Hill in Boston for more than forty years. During my sabbatical in 2015, I read Bob Shaw’s transcripts of the diary for the 1860s and early ‘70s; later, I reviewed PDFs of the diary volumes for the last decade of Mrs. Gray’s life. At some point in the process, I became aware that the Maryland Historical Society had a photo of Mrs. Gray, but it was only a looming American Ancestors cover story deadline that reminded me that it might be nice to see an image of the diarist.

Given my fascination with Mrs. Gray, I really cannot account for my lack of curiosity! Continue reading “A handsome woman in elaborate dress” →

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 →

Broadway and points west

American History, Collections, Research Methods, , ,
Harriet Hoctor by Dorothy Wilding.

I find that, once I start collecting something, the collection itself tends to dictate its own expansion. Put another way, I don’t always know what will interest me until I start looking at the items on either side of the object I seek to acquire. This is true of genealogical research, where it’s always a good idea to browse the library shelves around the book you are hunting, but of course it’s also true of the photographs I’ve been collecting recently. And, so – given the theme of the last two days’ posts at Vita Brevis – it’s time for another research exercise!

All of these photographs have something, or someone, in common – not pictured, of course. They represent a genus, the Broadway showgirl, that has sadly become extinct. Continue reading Broadway and points west →

A thousand words

American History, Collections, Family Stories, , , ,
Alice Selig Harris and friends

Coming from a family of active amateur photographers, the (still) new digital age of photography has significantly changed the way I look at and convey my world, its events, my life, and my family. Gone are the days of, “Oh, no, I just got to the end of a 36-exposure roll and missed the perfect picture I’ll never get again.” With three expensive cameras sitting in my closet collecting dust, like many of us I now use my smart phone for most of my photographic pursuits. This is not such a bad thing: it’s always in my pocket ready to get, as DeWitt Jones says, “not just a good frame, but a great frame.” Continue reading A thousand words →

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 →

Maine deeds online: a rich resource

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Alyssa True 1
The deed naming Moses True as the son of Winthrop True (and grandson of Israel True). Image courtesy of Cumberland County Registry of Deeds

A happy discovery in my genealogical research was the online availability of deeds for the state of Maine. The Maine Registers of Deeds Association provides links to each Maine county website. Users can download up to 500 pages per calendar year for free. As Lindsay Fulton wrote in her April post 8 More Vital Record Alternatives, deeds are often an acceptable source for proving specific relationships between family members. And if you haven’t gone hog wild and used up your quota already, you can stay in during this snowy end of the year downloading just about every mention of your Maine ancestors in these deeds.

The site for Cumberland County is a particularly rich example of this resource’s offerings. While other counties may only have a few decades of digitized deeds, Cumberland County has put up online records from 1753 to December 2015! Furthermore, it is especially valuable for Cumberland County researchers, as probate records for this area before the 1908 fire in Portland are (ahem) toast. Deeds for this county are currently not online at FamilySearch nor are they available on microfilm at NEHGS. Continue reading Maine deeds online: a rich resource →

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 →