My most recent immigrant ancestor was a great-great-grandfather, William Boucher Jr. (1822–1899), who followed his father from Germany to Baltimore in 1845. One generation back, I have three unknown great-great-great-grandparents and a further four who arrived during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries:

• Campbell Patrick White (1787–1859), who went with his parents to Baltimore from Belfast following the Uprising of 1798;
• Henry G. Hughes (c1811–1860) and his wife Olivia Letitia Coulton (c1817–1847), from Ireland to Geneva and Brooklyn, New York; and
• Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Esprit Boucher (b. in 1798), a native of Hamburg who was in New York during the 1830s and in Baltimore (with a second wife and young family) during the 1840s and 1850s.

Continue reading Brick Walls →

I have written here about some of my research strategies, and I thought it might be interesting to inventory a few of my recent discoveries (and brick walls).

It is easy to get distracted, and for the last decade or so I have kept a lot of my research notes in a Word file called “Notes on 1790–1930 Censuses.” (Yes, it predates the publication of the 1940 Federal Census, although I have begun to add information from that source as well.) Built around appearances in various censuses, the Notes document keeps me organized, as it is really my ahnentafel (or ancestor table), listing ancestors along with their children and their children’s spouses. In the footnotes, I keep track of my ancestral aunts’ and uncles’ children and their descendants. Continue reading Some recent discoveries →