The Great Migration in Vita Brevis

Family Stories, News, ,
St Bartholomews Groton
St. Bartholomew’s Church, Groton, Suffolk

Over the last five months, Vita Brevis has featured a number of blog posts about the Great Migration Study Project and related subjects. Robert Charles Anderson, the project’s director, has written on the topic, as have Alicia Crane Williams and Roger Thompson. Bob’s posts tend to focus on his continuing research in this area, whether it is his trips to Salt Lake City to review a thorny question about identity or the latest literature on the subject as he prepares to write a book tentatively entitled Puritan Pedigrees: The Deep Roots of the Great Migration to New England. Continue reading The Great Migration in Vita Brevis →

The Lane School on Malaga Island

Family Stories, News,

Mss A 1900 Pg15Captain George W. Lane, a Christian missionary and a Civil War veteran, first visited Malaga Island in 1906. The island, located in the New Meadows River near Phippsburg, Maine, is now an uninhabited state preserve, but in Captain Lane’s time the island was the site of a small mixed-race community of fishermen. In the summer of 1906, Captain Lane and his family rowed almost every day from their summer home on Horse Island (now Harbor Island) to Malaga. The inhabitants were poor, and there were few opportunities for education. The Lanes changed that. Captain Lane led regular church services for the residents of Malaga Island, while his wife, Lucy (Holden) Lane, and their daughters started a school for the island’s children. Continue reading The Lane School on Malaga Island →

Remembering Deane Winthrop

Family Stories
Courtesy of Bill Boyington/ Findagrave.com

Last night I went to the monthly meeting of the Winthrop Improvement and Historical Association on the grounds of the Deane Winthrop House to hear John Winthrop Sears speak about his ancestral uncle. Deane2 Winthrop (1623–1704) was Governor John1 Winthrop’s sixth son (the third son by the Governor’s third marriage), and he long outlived his full and half-siblings. He did so in one of the oldest wood-framed houses in the Commonwealth, one continuously occupied since the seventeenth century, on Pulling Point – now the City of Winthrop. Continue reading Remembering Deane Winthrop →

The Great Migration Study Project: a primer, Part Three

Family Stories, News, Research Methods,

Alicia Crane WilliamsHere is a table to help sort out where to look for your seventeenth-century ancestors in the publications associated with the Great Migration Study Project and the Early New England Families Study Project: Continue reading The Great Migration Study Project: a primer, Part Three →

Organizing a family reunion: Part Six

Family Stories, Research Methods
Three generations of Boucher women revised cropped
From left: Pauline Glidden Bell (1903-1968), Pauline Boucher Glidden (1875-1964), and Barbara Bell Steward (1932-1994).

William Boucher Jr. had children born over a period of forty years (1847–1887); his grandchildren were born between 1877 and 1925. Boucher’s great-grandchildren span more than a half century: the first was born in 1911 and the last, so far as I can tell, in 1965. I am a great-great-grandchild, born in the 1960s, and I think it quite likely that a few more of us will be born later in the 2010s. This generation will span something like seventy years.

Continue reading Organizing a family reunion: Part Six →

The Great Migration Study Project: a primer, Part Two

Research Methods, ,

Alicia Crane WilliamsThree volumes of The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633, and seven volumes of the “second series” Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635, have been published since 1995. Two “spin-off” volumes – The Pilgrim Migration: Immigrants to Plymouth Colony, 1620-1633, and The Winthrop Fleet: Massachusetts Bay Company Immigrants to New England, 1629-1630, containing reprints with some updating of the subject families that first appeared in Great Migration Begins – have also been issued. Continue reading The Great Migration Study Project: a primer, Part Two →

Organizing a family reunion: Part Five

Family Stories, Research Methods,

Mrs Edgar Lord Brooks cardMy maternal grandmother kept stationery boxes stuffed with letters and calling cards from the guests at my parents’ wedding in 1959. It’s interesting to see who was invited, since my mother’s wedding album only hints at who was there. Among the RSVPs is one from my father’s step-grandmother, who said she was coming from Florida: there is no hint of her in the album, but perhaps she was at the wedding. (I only met her once, unfortunately, although she died as recently as 2000.) Continue reading Organizing a family reunion: Part Five →

Further thoughts on preparing your genealogical project for publication

Family Stories, Research Methods

Penny at podium_croppedIn a recent blog post on preparing a project for publication, Scott Steward targeted that essential shift in thinking that must occur as you translate your research project into a writing project. And he pointed out how important it is to write a table of contents . . . and a title.

After talking at length with attendees at our Writing and Publishing Seminar about their projects, I realized that TOCs and titles figured large in those conversations. So here are three more thoughts on the topic: Continue reading Further thoughts on preparing your genealogical project for publication →

Using the HathiTrust Digital Library

News, Research Methods, ,

Alicia Crane WilliamsI have access to every book, microfilm and manuscript in the NEHGS library, but because I don’t actually work in the building (I work from home, generally on a 3 pm to 3 am schedule), I have to rely on the staff at the library to make copies. Fortunately, with so many books available on-line these days, I have been accumulating my own mini-digital library using google, archive.org, and openlibrary.org. Each of these has limitations of one kind or another – e.g., poor quality of digitizing, page numbers that don’t match, lack of indexing, wait time to borrow, inability to print, etc. Continue reading Using the HathiTrust Digital Library →

Traditional research techniques – and new ones

Family Stories, Research Methods, ,

roads for VBRobert Frost’s famous poem, The Road Not Taken, begins with his contemplation of “two roads diverg[ing] in a yellow wood,” and his indecision about whether to follow one path or the other. In the end, the author chooses what he deems “the path less traveled by.” Yet one must wonder whether another option was available? What about a possible third (or fourth or fifth) road? What about roads that have yet to be created? Sometimes, when conducting genealogical research, one must be aware of the possibility of other roads, as the mechanisms for knowing whether they exist may not yet have been developed. Occasionally, then, one must be willing to get off the known path to explore other, hidden roads. Continue reading Traditional research techniques – and new ones →