In yesterday’s post, I covered some of the more than 250 blog posts published in Vita Brevis during the first half of 2014. The series concludes with a post from each of the last six months of the year.
At the end of July, Katrina Fahy solved a genealogical puzzle using family letters, since the family in question lived in a region with few available nineteenth century vital records: Continue reading The year in review concluded
As I write this, a few days before the New Year begins, Vita Brevis is nearly a year old; it has had more than 300,000 page views since its first post on 2 January 2014. (This is a statistic I like to trumpet, although of course a single reader on a given day might well look at more than one entry: so I cannot claim 300,000 unique readers over the course of the first year, much as I would like to!) That first post, Generatio longa, vita brevis, hinted at the blog’s purpose: “Vita Brevis will include short posts on research methods – applicable to a variety of genealogical subjects – as well as posts on results. Like a mosaic, these posts will, in time, form a new collection for the genealogical researcher to explore.” Continue reading The year in review
Plymothians invented Forefather’s Day in 1769 to mark the anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, and to emphasize Plymouth Colony’s independent origins in response to what they felt was continued oppression by the English Crown. At different times the event has involved a ball, dinner, orations, and church services. Speakers have included the likes of Daniel Webster and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. For most of the last 200 years, the event has been hosted by the Pilgrim Society, whose Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth is the mecca for everyone interested in early New England history. Continue reading Forefathers’ Day
Thomas Hutchinson (1711–1780) was the last crown-appointed civilian governor of Massachusetts. During his term of office, he dealt with the aftermath of both the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts has recently published the first volume of his selected correspondence covering the years 1740–1766. It is most readily available through amazon.com. Here are further thoughts about the process of documentary editing by John Tyler, one of the volumes’ two co-editors.
It is often said that transcription (translating eighteenth-century handwriting into Microsoft Word) is about one-third of the work involved in documentary editing. For the Hutchinson papers, Malcolm Freiberg and Catherine Shaw Mayo had already established, in a preliminary way, the text of most key letters. Elizabeth Dubrulle and I would be negligent, however, if we did not check these against the originals, but Freiberg was very rarely wrong. Continue reading Reading other people’s mail: Part Two
Recently, I was searching for records in the towns of Southampton, Easthampton, and Bridgehampton, all in Suffolk County, New York. I was trying to determine the identity of the father of Abraham C., who was born in 1720 in Southampton and died about 1785. The client had done some excellent research, and through his efforts, concluded that there were two possible outcomes. Since finding direct evidence from records for New York during this time period can be tricky, I examined numerous publications from our NEHGS collection, including town histories, such as the multi-volume series Records of The Town of Southampton, With Other Ancient Documents of Historic Value; published genealogies; and the excellent New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. Continue reading Town historians: a helpful resource
This post marks the 250th blog post at Vita Brevis. To mark the occasion, I have asked some of our peerless contributors for suggestions on the theme of “jump starting“ genealogical research (and publication) for the holidays – with an eye toward 2015!
Consider sending a holiday letter out via email to your relatives. Then print a copy for posterity. – David Allen Lambert
Thomas Hutchinson (1711–1780) was the last crown-appointed civilian governor of Massachusetts. During his term of office, he dealt with the aftermath of both the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts has recently published the first volume of his selected correspondence covering the years 1740–1766. It is most readily available through amazon.com. Here are a few thoughts about the process of documentary editing by John Tyler, one of the volumes’ two co-editors.
The effort to bring Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s letters into print has a long history, much longer than the twenty years that I have been working on them. In 1951 and 1954, the National Historical Publications Committee at the Colonial Society of Massachusetts urged their publication. Later in the decade, Malcolm Freiberg and Catherine Shaw Mayo began transcribing the nearly 1,800 letters contained in Hutchinson’s letter books at the Massachusetts Archives. These transcriptions were an invaluable aid to anyone researching the Boston politics of the fifteen years before the American Revolution. Continue reading Reading other people’s mail: Part One
On 14 December 1964, NEHGS opened its doors to members at 99–101 Newbury Street for the very first time. The building on Newbury Street is the Society’s seventh home since it was founded in 1845, and this location has served as our headquarters during the greatest period of growth in our history. In the fifty years since arriving in the Back Bay, our membership has increased from 3,000 to an active constituency of more than 70,000; our library print collections have grown from 30,000 volumes to more than 250,000 volumes; and our endowment has improved from approximately $1 million to more than $25 million.
I wrote in American Ancestors last year about the fascinating discovery of the remains of King Richard III in a Leicestershire parking lot, and the use of mtDNA via matrilineal relatives over many generations to get a positive match. Now, in another twist to this story, comes the publication of Richard III’s Y-DNA results, published in Nature on 2 December 2014 – a second and more detailed genealogical chart appears in the Telegraph.
The gist of the story regarding the Y-DNA is that Richard III [haplogroup G-P287] did not share the same Y-DNA as four of the five documented descendants of Henry Somerset, 5th Duke of Beaufort [haplogroup R1b-U152], descended from Richard’s great-great-grandfather King Edward III (1312–1377), with some commentary on how this could affect claims to the crown during the War of the Roses. Continue reading Thoughts on the Y-DNA of Richard III
When one is associated with the Mayflower Society and other Pilgrim groups, it is almost inevitable that eventually one will be called upon to read the Mayflower Compact in public, and it was my duty to do so at the annual meeting of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts this year. The Mayflower Compact was written 394 years ago by a group of “forefathers” who found themselves sitting in a cold, wet ship in November in Cape Cod Bay. (They had thought they were going to land somewhere near the Hudson River, in what they called “Northern Virginia.”) Continue reading The Mayflower Compact