Category Archives: Family Stories

Keeping it in the family

American History, Collections, Family Stories, Research Methods, , ,
Susannah Brown will1
Susannah (Dexter) Brown’s will

Recently, I had a client who wanted to know more about a silver teapot designed by the Hurd silversmiths of Boston that had been passed down through his family. The teapot had the name “Sally Brown” engraved on it, but to his knowledge, he did not have any Brown relatives, which made the teapot a bit of a mystery.

With some research, we found a connection to the Brown family through ancestor Amey Martin (1784–1852), the wife of Samuel Nightingale Richmond; her parents were Silvanus Martin (1748–1819) and Amey Brown (1749–1833) of Providence, Rhode Island. Though I located a connection to a Brown family, my client’s direct ancestry did not contain anyone named Sarah or Sally Brown. Continue reading Keeping it in the family →

Blending a family

American History, Family Stories, ,

Lowell image 1Mine is a typical American family, and I am a typical genealogist. My family is an assortment of divorced households and second marriages and I, the ever diligent genealogist, have labored to research all of the family lines, even if they are not my own, because even when I don’t share their DNA, they are my family.

Like members of my immediate family, my blended family can be uninterested in the details of their own genealogy. Don’t get me wrong: they like the highlights (your great-grandparents were from County Cork or your ancestors were Loyalists who moved to Quebec), but not the mundane. Continue reading Blending a family →

Devil at the crossroads

American History, Family Stories, , ,
Robert Johnson full
One of only two confirmed images of Robert Johnson in existence.

Rock and roll icon Eric Clapton once described Robert Johnson as “the most important blues musician who ever lived.”[1] Despite the fact that Johnson influenced musicians decades after his death, his life is shrouded in mystery. Johnson is believed to have been born on 8 May 1911 in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, to Julia (Major) Dodds and Noah Johnson.[2] Julia was married to a prosperous landowner named Charles Dodds at the time of her son’s birth. Charles Dodds had been forced to leave Hazelhurst following a dispute with white land owners.[3]

By 1913, two-year-old Robert Johnson was sent to Memphis to live with Charles Dodds, where he is known to have attended school in 1916 before rejoining his mother in the Mississippi Delta area around 1919. Continue reading Devil at the crossroads →

On with the dance

Collections, Family Stories, , , , ,
“What a joy it is to dance and sing”

As genealogists, we tend to focus on the more remote past, rarely pausing to consider our parents’ or grandparents’ times in a rush to get back to 1850, or 1750, or sometime before that. Someday, of course, 1950 will seem as remote to our descendants as 1750 does to us, and it behooves us to focus some attention on twentieth century research before that century, like the ones before it, vanishes from shared (and contemporary) memory. Continue reading On with the dance →

This “piecemeal world”

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

Mark Twain is credited with the line “Humor is tragedy plus time,” and it is certain that with time comes perspective (and perhaps comedy). Of course, context is something that can be lost with time’s passage, as three entries in Regina Shober Gray’s diary suggest. In each case, her subjects are Philadelphia ladies, now (between 1874 and 1881) well-established: Mrs. Gray’s memory stretches back, though, to an earlier day, where their social status was more equivocal.

Boston, Saturday, 21 February 1874: [Rear Admiral Charles Steedman’s[1] daughter] Lou Steedman’s engagement to Dr. Lawrence Mason[2] is announced. I hope there goes more love to this affair then seems to have been vouchsafed to Rollins Morse, poor man, when Lou’s sister May consented to marry him.[3] Continue reading This “piecemeal world” →

“Here’s three times three”

American History, Collections, Family Stories, , ,

The youngest of the surviving Beeckman siblings, my great-great-uncle Livy[1] was the first to die. My great-grandmother – his sister Margaret Atherton (Beeckman) Steward (1861–1951) – preserved what was presumably the last of his letters, written from his house in California in advance of the Stewards’ fiftieth wedding anniversary in January 1935: it is among the family papers in my grandfather’s iron box.

“Dear Cam & Daisy,” Uncle Livy wrote, “I only wish I could send you a castle in gold to live in for the rest of your lives – but I am afraid it would be only a castle in the air. You have had such a wonderful life together that you have set us all an example I envy. I hope you both have many happy years together and I only wish I could be with you to congratulate you on the happy day. With much love to you both, R.L.B.” Continue reading “Here’s three times three” →

Consider the siblings

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

Annie Hughes deathFor the last several months, I have been trying to determine the origins of each of my mother’s Irish ancestors. In a previous post, I mentioned my success in locating the origins of my Kenefick ancestors; however, I have been having trouble with some ancestors with much more common surnames.

The earliest record I have for my maternal great-great-grandparents Patrick Cassidy and Mary Hughes is their marriage record, dated in Boston 28 November 1888. Continue reading Consider the siblings →

Navigating Calvary Cemetery

American History, Family Stories, Research Methods,

Clavary Cemetery 1aI am fortunate to be the oldest of eleven grandchildren. Because of my age, I was old enough to remember attending my great-great-aunt’s eightieth birthday party, dancing with my great-grandmother at my aunt’s wedding, and eating several Thanksgiving dinners with my great-great-uncle. I enjoyed spending time with my Lowell and Manhattan relatives; they had really cool stories about playing street games, stealing from ice trucks and, on one specific occasion, a time in which they were detained by police for catcalling an officer on horseback. So, when NEHGS sent me to Ridgefield, Connecticut, for a genealogical fair, I decided to take a slight detour to visit my storytelling ancestors who are buried in Calvary Cemetery in Queens. Continue reading Navigating Calvary Cemetery →

X marks the spot

Family Stories, Research Methods, Technology, , ,
X10b
Chart for male inheritance. Courtesy of thegeneticgenealogist.com

In my recent lectures on DNA, I have discussed the nature of X chromosome inheritance. Owing to the fact that males inherit Y chromosomes from their fathers (who received it only from their fathers, etc.), it’s a very specific gender-linked pattern of inheritance. The same is not true for the X chromosome. (Mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited female-to-female, is a different part of our DNA, and not the same as the X chromosome.) Continue reading X marks the spot →

Solving a family mystery

American History, Collections, Family Stories, , , , ,

Cottuli Pastel PortraitMy mother was born with an unusual last name – Cottuli – which has been both a blessing and a curse for my research. The blessing is that when I find someone with that last name, they always turn out to be related. The curse is that it’s misspelled everywhere and documents can be difficult to find. Recently, however, the uncommon name led to a very happy set of circumstances.

My first cousin, Carl Cottuli, contacted me a couple of months ago and said that a woman in Rhode Island named Keri had reached out to him online. She was cleaning out her stepfather’s desk in Massachusetts and discovered a portrait of a woman, together with an 1896 baptismal certificate for Henrietta Lillian Cottuli. There are no markings on the portrait to identify whether the woman is Henrietta or someone else. Continue reading Solving a family mystery →