Deed formats and terminology vary from colony to colony, county to county, time period to time period and from the handwriting and style of one clerk to another, all of which makes this a complex topic. As a basic primer, we are using a deed from Plymouth County, Massachusetts, chosen because it is short and legible![1] Continue reading Deeds: Part One
I 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
A couple of weeks ago I was working on an article for The Root, the online magazine, about locating World War I service records for a reader’s Mississippi ancestors. Knowing that the original service records are not digitized, but instead are housed at the National Archives in St. Louis, Missouri, I searched the Digital Archives of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for any online collections that might assist the reader.[1] My search was ultimately successful in that the MDAH has uploaded veterans’ service cards for World War I, but I also stumbled across a curious collection that I thought might interest our Vita Brevis readers: Educable Children Records (Mississippi), 1850–1894; 1906–1965. Continue reading Educable children
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
My 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
One day nearly two years ago, I entered a bookstore in my hometown of Westerly, Rhode Island. I had heard the store would be going out of business soon and wanted to take one last look around. After a few minutes, I came across a tan binder on the bottom shelf that had certainly seen better days. Curiously, the binder was a promotional item for Mel Scheib and Co. Wholesale Plumbing of Rapid City, South Dakota. Flipping through the contents of the binder, I found pages and pages of clippings from local newspapers – The Daily Tribune, The Westerly Sun, and The Westerly News (only the Sun remains in business today) – dating from 16 February 1889 to 24 January 1919. Continue reading Westerly, 1900
When I was perhaps three years old and lively, my mother returned to teaching grades K–8 in a one-room schoolhouse just north of our house in Augusta, Maine, known as the White Schoolhouse. Lacking daycare at the time, she took me with her most days, and I learned the Palmer method of cursive handwriting long before I learned to sit still. I didn’t realize until much later that the school had been a point of contention between my great-great-great-great-grandfather Read and the City’s school board. Continue reading The Red and White Schoolhouses
There is one thing that many people know about me, and that is that when I am not busily researching family trees and helping patrons here at the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s research center, the odds are pretty good that I am off somewhere watching hockey or studying its history. In fact, I just returned from a trip to Montréal to see the Montréal Canadiens beat the Boston Bruins. Had I known then of the exhibit currently on display at the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, I might have headed west, once I crossed the border, instead of going on to Montréal. However, it wasn’t until I had returned and was finalizing some pieces for a webinar that I saw the item on the website of the Library and Archives Canada (LAC). Continue reading Hockey and Canada, 1914-18
My grandfather’s box of family papers continues to yield treasures – and some fresh mysteries. Among the former (and the latter) are a pair of small leather traveling photo frames: one, the larger, is maroon and holds a photograph of a middle-aged woman; the other (biscuit colored) shows an older man being circled by a dog.
I suspect that the subjects of this pair of photos are my Steward great-grandparents,[1] although it is certainly possible that the woman is not Daisy Steward (1861–1951) but one of her sisters: Katharine Livingston (Beeckman) Lorillard (1855–1941), Helen (Beeckman) Lyman (1858–1938), or Martha Codwise (Beeckman) French (1863–1951). Continue reading Collateral relations
For the past two weeks, many NEHGS staff members celebrated birthdays, bringing to mind my birthday celebration last year. At the restaurant, our waiter announced my birthday to the entire restaurant and led them in singing to me. While that was embarrassing, it was fine until he asked my age. I answered with the old adage, “You know, it’s not polite to ask a lady her age.” As a genealogist, however, that answer left me feeling disappointed in myself. Where would we be today if our ancestors always responded to that question in such a way? Continue reading “Ask a lady her age!”