Disclaimer: If you are a member of the Happ family of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, please read no further.
I think I’ve done something bad. I may never be invited to another Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll never be allowed to see my family again.
I think I just discovered that my family has ties to New York City. Continue reading A code of ethics
One must always expect surprises when researching family history, because you just never know what you might uncover.
When researching my paternal ancestors, I discovered that our family had ties to one of the most remote places on the planet: the island of Saint Helena. Made famous as the location of Napoleon Bonaparte’s second exile, Saint Helena is a rocky, volcanic island located in the South Atlantic Ocean between South America and Africa. Continue reading “My ancestor was born … where?!”
As part of the Society’s Ask a Genealogist service, I was recently asked about locating someone in post-Revolutionary War Strafford, Vermont. The time frame in which this person lived reminded me of the special considerations for this region, which was once hotly disputed by New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, and even Massachusetts.
The territory that would become today’s Vermont was claimed by both New Hampshire and New York in the mid-eighteenth century, a squabble that took years to sort out. In general the land grants made by New Hampshire governor Benning Wentworth between 1749 and 1764 lay in territory already claimed by New York. A royal decree of 1764 awarded jurisdiction over the disputed territory to New York, which created four counties: Albany (established in 1764), and from Albany County Gloucester (1766) and Charlotte and Cumberland Counties (1772). Continue reading Mapping Vermont
As we approach the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I was reminded of a variety of early twentieth-century Rosh Hashanah postcards that I had seen in the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society–New England Archives. I remembered how detailed, ornate, and beautiful many of them were, works of art really, so I thought it would be fun to share some of them with all of you as the holiday approaches.
First, here is a brief note for those of you who may not be familiar with this particular Jewish holiday. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is this year celebrated from the evening of September 24 to the evening of September 26. Continue reading Inscribed in the Book of Life
If your family is anything like mine, you heard plenty of stories about your great-grandparents from your parents. From those stories I have been able to get a sense of their personalities and how they lived, but it is a view limited to how my parents knew them as their grandparents. Learning who your ancestors were as young adults is difficult, since most standard documents do not reveal an individual’s personality. My mother has a genealogical file on each of my relatives, where she keeps news clippings or other documents pertaining to their lives, which I often refer to while I am researching my family. During my last visit home, while searching through her files, I discovered the diary of my great-grandmother, Gladys Tompkins, from the year 1924. Continue reading Insights from my great-grandmother’s diary
Here at NEHGS, we are always on the lookout for interesting genealogical books, pedigrees, or other formats for documenting family history. One of my first blog posts here covered the Society’s acquisition of a fascinating (and literal) family tree showing all of Queen Victoria’s descendants at the time of her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Recently, I was directed to – and subsequently acquired – a Le Roy family register compiled by my cousin Edward Augustus Le Roy (1833–1913), one that showed all the descendants of the Le Roy immigrant down to about 1890. Continue reading The Le Roy family register
Tracing one’s family back to their country of origin can be daunting; often the birthplaces found on census records are just countries, with no indication given of province or county. Therefore, when I found my great-great-grandfather on the 1920 United States Federal Census, I groaned inwardly when I read the birthplaces of his parents: Scotland and Ireland.
William Muir’s parents were a Robert and Margaret Muir. As I noted yesterday, I found them in the 1860 United States Federal Census living in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Continue reading An unexpected helping hand
When I began working as a genealogist, my mother expressed great interest in learning more about her father’s family: the Muirs. While she had much information on her mother’s side of the family, which was quite large, she knew little about her father’s side of the family beyond her grandparents, so I began there. Continue reading Finding William Muir
For the past several years NEHGS has been giving seminars on writing and publishing a family history. These have been very popular, and as a result, Penny Stratton and I refocused the two previous NEHGS writing guides to reflect the contents of the seminars. The resulting book is the Guide to Genealogical Writing: How to Write and Publish Your Family History (Boston: NEHGS, 2014), just released. In twelve chapters this Guide covers everything from preparing a short informal booklet up to publishing an elaborate compiled genealogy. Chapters on writing for the Register and for American Ancestors were adapted from the two previous guides. To help readers visualize some of our specific examples, we included plenty of illustrations, most of them from recently published Newbury Street Press books. Continue reading Further thoughts on genealogical writing
Readers have asked for Early New England Families Study Project sketches for the ladies. Because genealogy is traditionally oriented to the male surname – and if a wife has only one husband – “reversing” his sketch for her would not include any more information. With 35,000 sketches to do, that is unneeded redundancy.
However, there are exceptions to every rule. In the cases where a woman has married more than one husband and has children by both (or more), then her sketch will contain different information from her husbands’ sketches. Thus to completely cover a family, sketches are needed for the husbands and the wives who connect them. Three new sketches have been posted on the website for three of these wives and a fourth is in progress. It is quite interesting what a change of view can do for our understanding of what it was like to be a wife and mother in seventeenth-century New England. Continue reading Remember the ladies!