Tag Archives: Spotlight

Proofing your family history

January 18, 2016Family Stories, Genealogical WritingCritical Analysis, SpotlightPenny Stratton

The Grammarly blog (Grammarly.com) recently had a post on proofreading your own writing. Among the suggestions it makes are two that I’ve made myself over the years:

Read it multiple times.
Read it tomorrow.

These recommendations are particularly apt for family histories, which are chock full of names, dates, place names, abbreviations, and special formatting that just cry out for at least several thorough reads. When I am editing or proofing a family history – mine or someone else’s – I often read through it once for sense and grammar, and then skim through once each for the following: Continue reading Proofing your family history →

The last survivor

January 13, 2016American History, News, Research MethodsCritical Analysis, Family papers, Research tips, SpotlightZachary Garceau

San Francisco City Hall — The remains of San Francisco’s City Hall, 20 April 1906. Courtesy of WIkimedia

“It was 5:14 o’clock in the morning of Wednesday, April 18 [1906]. Nearly half a million people on the western edge of the American continent awoke suddenly with a roaring in their ears and a sensation in every nerve that struck indescribable terror to their souls.”[1] On the fateful morning of the San Francisco earthquake, and in the troubling days that followed, more than 3,000 citizens lost their lives.[2]

In addition to the tragic loss of human life, the effects of another significant loss have been felt in the 110 years since that disastrous day. Continue reading The last survivor →

The skipped generation

January 12, 2016American History, Genealogical Writing, NewsCritical Analysis, Early New England Families Study Project, Great Migration Study Project, Spotlight, The Well-Stocked Genealogical LibraryAlicia Crane Williams

Three more sketches (16 pages) in the Early New England Families Study Project have just been posted – John Carter of Woburn; Samuel Maverick of Noddles Island, Boston, Maine, New York, etc.; and his wife Amyas (Cole) (Thomson) Maverick.

John Carter is the first example in the Early New England Families Study Project of a second-generation New Englander who arrived with his parents during the “second,” unpublished, half of the Great Migration. This results in the anomaly that John Carter’s sketch is published before his father’s, which might confuse researchers assuming that the two projects are seamlessly synced. Continue reading The skipped generation →

Old genealogies in the digital age

January 11, 2016American History, Genealogical Writing, NEHGS Collections, NewsObject Lessons, Spotlight, The Well-Stocked Genealogical LibraryEmily Baldoni

Portrait of Henry Stoddard Ruggles, author of The Ruggles Family in England and America (1898).

For the past six months, I have been devoting much of my time as Metadata Librarian at NEHGS to making older genealogies from our Boston research library available online in the NEHGS Digital Library and Archive. These genealogies, most of them originally published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are rare or unique to NEHGS, and have not been previously available online.

By adding them to our Digital Library, we hope that we can not only increase access to these hard-to-find resources, but also better preserve the physical books themselves, which are often suffering from the effects of brittle, acidic paper and deteriorating bindings. We have added items ranging from short, privately printed pamphlets – such as the five-page Family and Antecedents of William Henry Rayner and Jeanie Ann Balmer – to longer, more comprehensive treatises, like Henry Stoddard Ruggles’s The Ruggles Family in England and America. Continue reading Old genealogies in the digital age →

Strategies for Scottish and Irish research

January 8, 2016American History, Research MethodsBrick Walls, Critical Analysis, Family papers, Family stories, International genealogical research, Irish research, Research tips, SpotlightKatrina Fahy

[Editor’s note: Katrina Fahy has written a number of posts on researching her Scottish, Irish, and German ancestors. Some of her techniques – and successes – are excerpted below.]

From Finding William Muir: 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 Strategies for Scottish and Irish research →

A Telluride story

January 5, 2016American History, Family Stories, Genealogical WritingFamily papers, Family stories, Object Lessons, Photographs, SpotlightSharon Inglis

Alice and Kenny — Alice Pheasey and Kenneth McLean on their wedding day.

There are many stories that reside in the papers and photographs our forebears set aside to keep. These stories sometimes lack a key, but here is one that, thanks to a loving sister, retains its general outline.

Kenneth Angus McLean was born in 1873 in a farmhouse on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the youngest of nine children. As a young man, Kenny left the family farm to join his older sister Christine in Boston, where he would have a wider choice of occupations. He didn’t last long in the confines of the city. Kenny, like so many others, decided to seek his fortune out west. He took out a $1,000 life insurance policy, named his sister as beneficiary, and got on a westbound train. Continue reading A Telluride story →

Three years in

January 4, 2016American History, Genealogical Writing, Research MethodsCritical Analysis, Early New England Families Study Project, Great Migration Study Project, Spotlight, The Well-Stocked Genealogical LibraryAlicia Crane Williams

We are just about to start the fourth year of the Early New England Families Study Project. There are presently 72 sketches online, and now the first of the hard copy publications covering 50 families is available as well. New sketches scheduled to be uploaded in January include Samuel Maverick and his wife Amias (Cole) (Thompson) Maverick.

These sketches have definitely developed into far more detailed and complex endeavors than we originally conceived. It isn’t that we thought it was going to be easy, but we did have some hopes that “summarizing” a couple of centuries of collected works on these families would be simpler that it is turning out to be. So why is that? Continue reading Three years in →

2015: the year in review concluded

January 1, 2016American History, Family Stories, Genealogical Writing, News, Research MethodsCritical Analysis, Early New England Families Study Project, Family papers, Family stories, Great Migration Study Project, Object Lessons, Spotlight, The Well-Stocked Genealogical LibraryScott C. Steward

On the first day of 2016, Vita Brevis can boast 780,157 page views over the life of the blog. With dozens of voices writing for the blog, I hope that readers will check back often to see what’s new at Vita Brevis. Following yesterday’s blog post, here follows a snapshot of the second six months of 2015 at the blog.

Robert Charles Anderson’s post on the new Great Migration Directory was published on 1 July:

The Great Migration Directory attempts to include all those who immigrated to New England during the Great Migration, and only those immigrants. After much examination of the historical record, and particularly of the activities of the passenger vessels each spring, I determined that the Great Migration ended during 1640,and so this volume is designed to include every head of household or unattached individual who arrived between 1620 and 1640. Continue reading 2015: the year in review concluded →

2015: the year in review

December 31, 2015American History, Family Stories, Genealogical Writing, NEHGS Collections, News, Research MethodsA Genealogist's Diary, Brick Walls, Critical Analysis, Family papers, Family stories, International genealogical research, Irish research, SpotlightScott C. Steward

scanros1 — Meeting cousins in County Roscommon.

Vita Brevis recently marked a milestone, with the publication of its five-hundredth blog post. Early in January 2016, the blog will celebrate its second birthday, and, in a tradition started last year, today and tomorrow I will write about twelve representative posts published in the blog in 2015. With about 250 posts in both 2014 and 2015, Vita Brevis holds a lot of material for readers to sample, and I urge the curious to wend their way through the blog using authors, categories, or tags to navigate.

On 23 January, Eileen Pironti wrote about finding some of her Irish cousins in County Roscommon: Continue reading 2015: the year in review →

Chaos in the streets

December 29, 2015American HistoryCritical Analysis, Research tips, SpotlightZachary Garceau

Moving Day 2 — Moving Day, 1831. Images courtesy of Wikimedia.org

As many genealogical researchers know, tracing your ancestors in major metropolitan areas can prove difficult, thanks to the use of similar names, confusing address patterns, and, often, changing locations. In New York City, residents changed addresses rather frequently, making it challenging to place them in any one location for an extended period. Interestingly, residents in New York City often relocated around the same time each year due to a long-standing tradition, Moving Day. Continue reading Chaos in the streets →