[Editor’s note: This blog post first appeared in Vita Brevis on 20 March 2017.]
Following up on correcting the charts in my Seeing double blog post, the chart showing my ancestor Anna (Salisbury) Slade was a recent disappointment and involved removing some ancestors from my charts. The chart identified Anna’s parents as Daniel Salisbury and Anna Hale, and had Anna as the child of Rev. Moses Hale (Harvard 1699) and Mary Moody of Newbury, with several early Newbury ancestors including Henry and Jane (Dummer) Sewall, who were the parents of Judge Samuel Sewall (1652–1730), known for his involvement in the Salem witch trials. Continue reading ICYMI: Bye-bye-bye→
[Editor’s note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 22 May 2017.]
My cousin with his parents.
I recently traveled to Michigan to watch my cousin, Scott, graduate from Michigan State University (Go Spartans!) with a law degree. And like any good family member/genealogist, while I sat with my family waiting for the commencement to commence, I examined the program for Scott’s name. After a few moments, I located my cousin’s first and middle name: Scott Harrison. Excited, I asked my aunt and uncle whether Harrison was a family name. “Nope,” my uncle explained, “when your aunt was eight months pregnant, we got the name Harrison from a billboard that we passed while driving home. It sounded presidential, so we went with it.” Now, because my family is beyond sarcastic, I didn’t believe them at first; however, after a few minutes of my uncle insisting this was the case, I relented – I guess they got the name from a billboard. Continue reading ICYMI: The name game→
Sometimes curiosity can take you down a rabbit hole. The other week, while joking about the 1989 movie Weekend at Bernie’s, I decided to see if the actor who played the dead “Bernie” had anything of interest in his ancestry. Terry Kiser, who is not dead, has been an actor for more than fifty years, but his role as a moving corpse in both this film and its sequel (Weekend at Bernie’s II) appears to be his most memorable. Continue reading Weekend at Brewstie’s→
Eunice (Coffin) Rogers (1846-1930), grand-daughter of Captain Levi Starbuck.
On a visit home several months ago, my older son introduced me to some works by H. P. Lovecraft that have been dramatized as pseudo-radio broadcasts. My son thought I would particularly enjoy The Case of Charles Dexter Ward … which is a bit of a warning to all of us family historians who might be tempted to take things a bit too far!
In this spooky short story, young Charles Dexter Ward comes from a prominent Providence, Rhode Island family, and gets pretty obsessed with an ancestor named Joseph Curwen, who fled from Salem Village during the 1692 witch trials and became a successful merchant, shipping magnate, slave trader … and sorcerer. The story is pure fiction (at least we should all hope that it is!), but it features several actual eighteenth-century Rhode Island luminaries, including Abraham Whipple, John and Moses Brown, and Esek Hopkins. Continue reading The case of Levi Starbuck→
Families of the seventeenth century expected that their scandals would die out pretty much when the last neighbor who knew about them died. It is fortunate, therefore, that they cannot know how easy it is for us to dig up long-buried skeletons today. An example of this came to light while I was working on two Watertown families.[1]
William Parry [sic] settled in Watertown by 1641, and he and his wife Anna [maiden name unknown] had six children. Richard Hassell arrived in Cambridge about 1643 and he and wife Joan [maiden name unknown] had three children born there. Continue reading Family drama→
Thomas and Bernard Corcoran arrive in New York in 1920.
Tracing your immigrant ancestors across the ocean is a journey. You need to understand the ports they have left from as well as those to which they came. You also need to familiarize yourself with the different resources available to locate passenger lists – whether on FamilySearch, Ancestry, stevemorse.org, or even in overseas archives. When we find an ancestor’s passage to the United States, this journey doesn’t end when they step foot off the boat. Many of our ancestors travelled back overseas to visit family they left behind, bringing money that they made during their time here. Some even brought back additional family members after establishing their roots in a new land. Continue reading Family left behind→
I love to walk. Sweet fern and dry grasses scented the warm air during my late summer walks through the Blue Hills. As Marcel Proust describes in Remembrance of Things Past, scents evoke memories. In my case, the memories are of my grandmother and lazy summer days at New Canada Farm in Danbury, New Hampshire. It wasn’t until cleaning out my mother’s papers after her death that I learned that New Canada Farm was named for a nineteenth-century settlement of French Canadian farmers along the road. New Canada Road starts at Route 4 in Wilmot and hugs the contours of Ragged Mountain before passing into Danbury and turning towards Gulf Brook. Continue reading Family lore→
My great-great-grandfather John Francis Bell (1839–1905)[1] is largely a mystery: he appears unheralded in Richmond, Virginia, in the mid-nineteenth century; his son’s 1915–37 journal makes no reference that I can find to any family on the Bell side. (My great-great-grandmother, known after her marriage as Bell Bell, was Isabella J. Phillips, of a large family centered in Henrico County; I have yet to see any mention of her cousins, some of whom my grandfather knew well.)
John George Lea with his wife Harriet Ann (Wilkinson) Lea and their children Mary Olive (Lea) Rogers and John Samuel Lea, ca. 1906.
Since 1993, I have read countless family records within the pages of old family Bibles for colleagues and patrons at NEHGS. I have been fortunate to share in many moments of discovery. The moment when patrons discover we have their family Bible is priceless.
However, until recently I had never experienced this same moment of discovery for myself. Of course, I always hoped that one day I would walk into an archive, historical society, or a relative’s home and miraculously discover an old family Bible relating to my branch of the family. Most of the time this was simply a lovely ending to a genealogical day dream.
A few years ago, I was reviewing copies of letters between my great-aunt Mary Olive (Lea) Rogers (1899–1995) and her cousin Florence Newton written during the 1960s. In one of those letters her cousin asked: “Do you still have that large family bible that sat on the little table in Toronto your dad owned?” I paused and considered that a family Bible for my great-grandfather John George Lea (1876–1953) might actually exist. Then I realized this is the same man who received a trunk of family papers and photos from his late brother in England, decided they smelt funny, and tossed in a match! And, so, up in smoke went any hope that my family history had survived. I tried not to think of what might have been in the trunk, let alone what became of this old Bible. Continue reading The saga of a family Bible→
The Rev. Thomas Cary posed for this portrait by John Singleton Copley ca. 1770. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
American Ancestors recently shared, via social media and TheWeekly Genealogist, the news that the Rev. Thomas Cary’s diary (owned by NEHGS) was mentioned in a Ben Franklin’s World podcast. His diary was among the documents Susan Clair Imbaratto consulted in writing Sarah Gray Cary from Boston to Grenada: Shifting Fortunes of an American Family, 1753–1825. Combined with the anniversary of my own visit to the Chelsea, Massachusetts house in which Sarah (Gray) Cary and her husband — Thomas’s brother Samuel — lived, this news seemed like a clear invitation to write another blog post about the family.
This time I wanted to focus on Thomas’s life as a minister, a topic very close to my heart since my husband is also a minister. While the life of an eighteenth/nineteenth-century Congregational cleric has some profound differences from that of a twentieth/twenty-first-century Episcopal priest, I’ve found many diary entries that resonate with personal experience.Continue reading Call to ministry→
Following up on correcting the charts in my Seeing double blog post, the chart showing my ancestor Anna (Salisbury) Slade was a recent disappointment and involved removing some ancestors from my charts. The chart identified Anna’s parents as Daniel Salisbury and Anna Hale, and had Anna as the child of Rev. Moses Hale (Harvard 1699) and Mary Moody of Newbury, with several early Newbury ancestors including Henry and Jane (Dummer) Sewall, who were the parents of Judge Samuel Sewall (1652–1730), known for his involvement in the Salem witch trials. Continue reading ICYMI: Bye-bye-bye 
