Category Archives: Genealogical Writing

Double trouble

Family Stories, Genealogical Writing, Research Methods, , , , ,
The red boxes mark the neighboring townlands in which the Holland families lived. Courtesy of National Library of Scotland

Recently I was researching my Holland surname line and ran into an interesting problem. I found two men named William Holland, each of whom married a woman named Ellen Fleming, in the same parish around the same time. Which was the right William Holland and Ellen Fleming for my family? Were the couples related? How was I going to tell their children apart?

These two Irish couples were from Barryroe parish in County Cork. One couple married in 1820 and the other in 1839. I found baptismal records for children with these parents born between 1820 and 1845. Luckily, the Holland child I was tracing was born in 1828, so I knew he belonged to the older couple who married in 1820. Continue reading Double trouble →

A Lowell mystery

American History, Genealogical Writing, ,

One of the upcoming Early New England Families Study Project sketches is that for Richard Lowell of Newbury, Massachusetts. Richard was the son of Percival Lowell, who came to New England in 1639 at the age of about 69 with several grown children. Richard, Percival’s eldest son, was 37, and he apparently brought with him a wife and either an infant or in utero son who was named Percival. Richard had three more children born in Newbury: Rebecca, 27 January 1641[/42]; Samuel, about 1644; and Thomas, 28 September 1649. Continue reading A Lowell mystery →

Seduction’s double

American History, Family Stories, Genealogical Writing, Research Methods, , , ,
Horace Fenton Bloodgood (1867-1928)

Recently, I was prompted to take a ‘second look’ at my wife’s grandfather, Horace Fenton Bloodgood. Fenton married my wife’s grandmother, a young Spanish girl named Magdalena Murrieta,[1] in Buena Vista, Sonora, Mexico, in 1908 while working for the railroad.[2] (He was 41 and she 16.) Family lore was that the senior Bloodgoods were so outraged by Fenton’s errant disrespect of the status quo that he had already been largely disowned prior to his parents’ deaths and his marriage to Magdalena. Indeed, Fenton was left only the proverbial $1.00 in the will of his father Julius Bloodgood. Continue reading Seduction’s double →

The Fishers of Dedham

American History, Family Stories, Genealogical Writing, ,

When I started working on the Early New England Families Study Project sketch for Daniel Fisher of Dedham, I had a vague recollection that he might be one of my ancestors. However, once I pulled out my old folded, torn, and turning-brown 12-generation wall chart (only about half of which has been entered in my genealogy database), I realized that no, I am not descended from Daniel. My ancestor is Daniel’s first cousin, Joshua Fisher Jr.

Daniel and Joshua Jr.’s fathers, Anthony and Joshua Fisher, were brothers, both of whom brought their families to New England in the late 1630s. This means they have not yet been treated in the Great Migration Study Project (complete only through 1635), but, very fortunately, the Fishers and their ancestors have recently been more than thoroughly treated in print.[1] Continue reading The Fishers of Dedham →

Fluid genealogy

American History, Family Stories, Genealogical Writing, Technology, , , ,

By now followers of my Vita Brevis posts are well aware that no genealogy is perfect. Period. No matter who wrote it.

The old mindset that a work published in a book or an article is automatically complete and completely accurate should be dead by now. The problem has always been that, once a book is in print, there is no practical way of updating and correcting information without reprinting the entire book.

On the other hand, modern electronic publication (in theory) offers endless opportunity to keep a genealogy “live.” Continue reading Fluid genealogy →

Genealogical connections to Spain

Genealogical Writing, News,
Statue of King Fernando I of Castile outside the Royal Palace of Madrid.

Last month, my wife and I took a vacation to Madrid. While Spanish is my wife’s largest “pre-1492” ethnic background (the others being African and Native-American), I have yet to trace an ancestor who was actually born anywhere besides the Dominican Republic. The furthest I’ve gone is to an ancestor born about 1713, who appears on an 1812 census in her father’s hometown of San Francisco de Macoris. (See this post for information on some of my wife’s Dominican Republic ancestry.)

However, through a few of my own documented “royal” lines, I end up with a few cases of Spanish ancestry through my colonial British forebears. On our trip to Madrid, we walked through the Buen Retiro Park and outside the Royal Palace of Madrid, both of which have numerous statues of rulers of various Spanish kingdoms (Castile, Aragon, Leon, Barcelona, etc.), as well as monarchs after unification with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella. Continue reading Genealogical connections to Spain →

A knock at the door

Family Stories, Genealogical Writing, ,
Grace Brickley (1904-2004). Click on the images to expand them.

She was not pleased to see me – this paternal first cousin of my (biological) great-grandmother, Opal Young.[1] Her name was Grace,[2] and we had arranged our meeting through the mails, never having spoken to each other by telephone. Before, as I had stood on her stoop waiting for her to answer my knock, it was hard for me to believe that I would be meeting with a blood relative of my grandmother’s – one outside the small circle of my grandmother’s own descendants. I wondered how she might appear to me (part of me thought surely on a broomstick?) and I wondered what of “her family” she might recognize in me, too.

In some ways I am not sure why Grace agreed to see me at all. She was, after all, a 91-year-old spinster living alone in the hills above Glendale, California. While I had done my best to answer her many questions in advance, the prospect of meeting a strange relation at the door that day must have both daunted and intrigued her. Continue reading A knock at the door →

What do you know?

Family Stories, Genealogical Writing, , , ,
Margaret Steward (1888-1975) in Tours during the First World War.

In a recent meeting here at NEHGS, the conversation turned to the ease with which visitors to our Newbury Street building could fill out a three-, four-, or five-generation family chart, listing themselves, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents. I suspect that for many members of the NEHGS staff, such a chart would be easy to create – the vital record sources for that chart, of course, would take longer to fill in, and it’s unlikely that any one of us could make up that list from memory.

I thought it would be interesting to see if my siblings could do it: Could they go beyond our grandparents, three of whom they might have known, to list great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents?

The answer, based on a response rate of 75%, is … No. Continue reading What do you know? →

Desktop publishing woes

Genealogical Writing, Technology,

Desktop publishing refers to computer programs that allow you to create works with both text and graphics in the same file. I never got into the Mac and Apple world, so my experience is only with PC programs such as Microsoft Word, which has always done well with text, but is limited when incorporating graphics. Programs such as Microsoft Publisher and Adobe InDesign pick up the gap between programs that specialize in words and those that specialize in pictures.

My go-to program in the past has been Microsoft Publisher. When it originally came out thirty years ago, it emphasized the ability to take large Word files and merge them into larger book-length files and then convert them to formats that were used by commercial printers, such as PDFs. Today one can create a PDF file directly from within the Microsoft Word program. If one does not need sophisticated graphics for a book, therefore, one does not necessarily need a desktop publishing program. Continue reading Desktop publishing woes →