‘Aching hearts’

American History, Family Stories, NEHGS Collections,

Regina Shober Gray by [Edward L.] Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
The death of the diarist’s sister Lizzie Shober[1] fills pages in her manuscript diary.[2] Here, in the second installment (of three), Mrs. Gray gathers memories and impressions of her sister’s recent deathbed:

61 Bowdoin Street, Boston, Tuesday, 12 December 1865: On Wednesday, Nov. 30, 1864, we laid our dear brother John[3] in the quiet church yard at St. James the less.[4] He died on Sunday the 27th. Just one year from that sad day, the darling of all our hearts, my sister Lizzie, lay at the last gasp apparently – and though she rallied for a few days of inexpressible comfort to us all, she too left us on Friday Dec 1st and was laid by his side, on just such a soft Indian summer [day] as we had for him, on Monday, Dec. 4th, 1865. She was so wasted and altered that I can not realize yet, that it was our bright cheery Lizzie we left there.

It was Suffering & Death we laid in the cold dark tomb, not our darling; even the profile was unnatural, all the sweet smiling lines, drawn & rigid – and the plain hair, parted back like a child’s, and cut short, for its length & weight distressed her so, looked so unlike the rich full puffs, every wave of which caught such a rich golden auburn glow, upon its lovely chestnut brown. Continue reading ‘Aching hearts’ →

Essayons

American History, Genealogical Writing, ,

At last, the cast of Volume 2 of Early Families of New England 1641-1700 is set. See below for a list of all fifty sketches.

The inventory includes five sets of siblings: John and Samuel Carter; Andrew and George Lane; Daniel, John, and Joseph Morse; Joshua and Thomas Scottow (and brother-in-law Robert Winsor); and John and Samuel Sherman.

Three women have sketches in this volume: Mary (Smith) (Glover) Hinckley, Jane (Conant) (Holgrave) Mason, and Amyas (Cole) (Thompson) Maverick, in addition to their husbands: Thomas Hinckley, Nathaniel Glover, Joshua Holgrave, and Samuel Maverick. Continue reading Essayons →

Snail mail

American History, Family Stories, Research Methods, , , ,

As I have mentioned in other blog posts, the focus of my research has been on my maternal ancestry from Ireland, Germany, and Italy. While researching my Italian heritage, I have come across various places listed as my ancestors’ places of birth, from tiny frazioni (the equivalent of a parish) to various larger comuni (towns). To make researching my Italian ancestry harder is the fact that I am from the northern part of Italy, about 40 miles outside of Milan. Continue reading Snail mail →

Don’t fence me in

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

I grew up on this long-time family-owned property next door to my paternal grandparents, Rex Church (1883–1956) and Winifred Lee (1884–1980). I saw them almost every day until their deaths, ate lunches and holiday meals with them, slept overnight there with my cousins, and saw them only as my grandparents. I suspect that, like many other people, I’ve only come to really know them as I piece together family stories.

Long after my grandparents’ deaths, my brother and I took on the task of clearing out the house in preparation for his renovations. I began to learn more about my grandparents the more old photos we found between pages of every book or magazine (I’m not sure who was reading the collected speeches of Andrew Jackson, but there it was), and taking down framed photos, mostly of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Continue reading Don’t fence me in →

Further ancestors of the Princess of Wales

Genealogical Writing, Research Methods, , ,

Finishing up the generation of the Princess of Wales’s great-great-great-great-grandparents –­ as part of a review of scholarship that has become available since Richard Evans’s book, The Ancestry of Diana, Princess of Wales, was published in 2007 – there is something more to be said about her matrilineal ancestress in that generation, Eliza Kewark (or Kevorkian) of Surat in the Indian state of Gujurat.[1]

The daughter of Jakob Kevork/Hakob Kevorkian, and sister-in-law of Aratoon Baldassier (or Baldassarian), her voice may be heard in a series of letters she wrote to her partner (and, perhaps, husband) Theodore Forbes between 1812 and 1819; the last – concerning Forbes’s plan to send their daughter to his family in Scotland – strikes a formal note: Continue reading Further ancestors of the Princess of Wales →

How long is a generation?

American History, Family Stories, Mayflower 2020, Technology, ,

Much of my attention over the last eighteen months has been focused on creating the online database Mayflower Families Fifth Generation Descendants, 1700-1880. It was great to make this resource available to help people research their Mayflower ancestry.

Now we have a database with nearly 165,000 birth, marriage, and death records, and thus a unique opportunity to do some analysis on the Mayflower fifth generation descendants in aggregate, looking for interesting facts about this group. Continue reading How long is a generation? →

Who are the Rogerenes?

American History, Family Stories,
John Rogers’ appeal, 1675. Connecticut State Library, State Archives, RG 000, Samuel Wyllys papers

While attending the FGS conference in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in August, Lynn Martin of Paw Paw, Michigan visited the NEHGS booth in the vendor hall and introduced me to her early immigrants – specifically her Rogers family. John Rogers, Sr. founded his own religion – the Rogerenes, in 1674 – in New London, Connecticut. Today, the only tangible remains of this religion in Connecticut are the neighborhoods of Quaker Hill in Waterford and Quakertown in Ledyard. While sometimes referred to as the Rogerene Quakers, they actually never had any association with the Society of Friends. Instead, their roots come from the Seventh Day Adventists. Continue reading Who are the Rogerenes? →

More fires

American History, Family Stories, , , ,
Stone sculptures purchased on vacation in British Columbia were the only items in my father’s house to (mostly) survive the October 1991 Oakland Fire.

Just after 5:30 a.m., last October 9, I got a text from my half-sister letting me know that she and her children were safe at her mother’s house, but that her own home just outside Santa Rosa, California, had very likely burned. She’d awakened after midnight to the smell of smoke, and upon investigation discovered that wildfire was below her hill. Throwing on clothes, she and her kids evacuated down their winding, country road, as she blasted her car horn all the way down to alert neighbors of the danger. It appeared that Jennifer had become the one in our generation to be tapped by the finger of our family curse. Continue reading More fires →

Volunteer appreciation

American History, Collections, Genealogical Writing, Research Methods, Technology, ,
Volunteer Dianne Wesselhoeft uses a static dissipating brush to collect the pieces of paper and dust from the gutter of a Saint Patrick volume.

I started at NEHGS as a volunteer, coming in every Friday for about four hours. My first project involved checking the transcriptions of the names that other volunteers had made against other sources to help decipher some of the names. Often this involved me running up to the fifth floor, where the local histories are kept, or 7, where the genealogies are, to check spellings. After a few weeks I was familiar enough with the handwriting that I did not have to go use outside sources to verify the transcription. Not long afterwards, I began scanning a manuscript for Special Collections and then, as I was in library school at the time, working with actual collections and providing additional details for finding aids. Continue reading Volunteer appreciation →

‘Rest & be comfortable’

American History, NEHGS Collections, ,

Regina Shober Gray by [Edward L.] Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
The death of the diarist’s sister Lizzie Shober[1] is the subject of three diary entries – among the longest passages in the Regina Shober Gray[2] diary, and closing out the year 1865. In these entries Mrs. Gray approaches her subject directly and obliquely, focusing on different moments in Lizzie’s last days as she tries to make sense of the Shober family’s loss.

In her characterization of her younger sister, Mrs. Gray sketches out a Victorian ideal of a maiden lady: “She was pre-eminently the sun shine of her home – the darling sister to each one of us; enjoying all bright, glad things in life, with keenest zest, interested in the smallest details if they were able to pleasure others, ready with quickest sympathies in joys as in sorrows & anxieties – always hopeful if hope were possible, and efficient in all things; at all times considerate & thoughtful for others, self-forgetting, loving, and most lovable.” Continue reading ‘Rest & be comfortable’ →