When we think about Italian immigration here at NEHGS, it is often because the patron we are helping is looking for ancestors who arrived here in the late 1800s or early 1900s. However, Italians immigrated to many different countries, including other European countries as well as countries in South America and other continents such as Australia. Continue reading World wide Italian immigration
One day a few years ago, my mother (who was 85 at the time) got a phone call from a young lady who said “Hello, I think I’m your cousin!” Mom, who was well aware of and always on the lookout for scams, immediately assumed that this was just one more. The caller said that she was the great-granddaughter of my mother’s father’s sister, ‘Louisa.’ Mom, who knew all of her father’s siblings, had visited the family regularly in Detroit when she was a child and never met or even heard of an aunt with that name. Continue reading A suspicious first cousin
Instead of identifying a person’s date of birth, death certificates and gravestones sometimes identify the deceased person’s age in years, months, and days. But what is the purpose of giving an exact age rather than a birth date, and how is this age determined? Are there any consistent rules for this process?
In Colonial America it was traditional practice to inscribe a tombstone with the deceased’s age in years, months, and days. For example, the cemetery marker for Griffith Thomas was inscribed with the following: “In Memory of Griffith Thomas who departed this life October 25th 1800 Aged 58 years, 9 months and 10 days.” Continue reading Calculating age at death – and why
Martha Anne (Kuhn) Clarke kept a diary in 1836, while a student at the Temple School in Boston. The series of excerpts began here. In this installment she writes of her last days at school and the beginning of a trip out to the western part of Massachusetts. Continue reading Excerpts from Martha Anne Kuhn’s diary, 1836
The NEHGS Digital Library and Archive has a growing collection of family histories, covering a wide range of subjects and surnames. Roughly three quarters of the 137 titles currently in the collection are older books from the stacks of the NEHGS Library – usually published before 1923, and now free from copyright restrictions – which have been digitized and put online. Examples of materials that have been digitized from our collection so far include: Continue reading Online family histories, old and new
The “Manuscripts@NEHGS” column in the Spring 2014 issue of American Ancestors contains extracts from each of the three collections processed by interns for the R. Stanton Avery Special Collections during the Fall of 2013. The collections were the Burnham Family Papers (Mss 1120), Charles Harold Floyd Family Papers (Mss 1118), and the Walker Family Papers (Mss 1119). While interns were working on these collections, the Special Collections staff began processing a fourth collection, the Horace Augustus Knowles Papers. This collection also contains interesting personal accounts, similar to those highlighted in the magazine article. Continue reading The Horace Augustus Knowles Papers
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
“It’s so dreadful to be poor!” sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.
“I don’t think it’s fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all,” added little Amy, with an injured sniff.
“We’ve got Father and Mother, and each other,” said Beth contentedly from her corner.
So begins Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Little Women, whose opening lines have always stuck in many readers’ minds, including my own. When reading Little Women as a young man, I was unaware that I would one day find a manuscript that mentions her controversial father, Bronson Alcott, who was a teacher, philosopher, and creator of the Temple School in Boston, Massachusetts, in the early nineteenth century. Continue reading Excerpts from Martha Anne Kuhn’s diary, 1836
When I first began researching at the NEHGS Library, I was drawn to the wide array of cemetery records that could be found in published books and donated manuscripts. It’s not by choice that I spend time locating cemetery records; it is because many family members had the ‘misfortune’ of living in New York State, where, outside of New York City, vital records registration did not start until 1881. Instead of using cemetery records to supplement birth and death dates, they often represent the only vital information on my ancestors. Continue reading Tiptoe through the tombstones
In the days when livestock mostly roamed loose in New England towns, it was critical that farmers could identify which animals belonged to them – to avoid disputes, identify stolen property, or recover damages if your crops were ruined by the neighborhood’s hogs. While branding with a hot iron was done, mostly the system they used involved nicks, slits, or holes, etc., cut into the animal’s ears (similar to humans piercing their ear lobes), called “ear marks.” The types of cuts and patterns were registered with the town clerk and sometimes would be inherited from father to son. I think some of these farmers were far more assiduous in recording their animals’ ear marks than they were in recording their children. Continue reading Ear marks and horse censuses
I just returned from representing the New England Historic Genealogical Society at the Southern California Genealogical Jamboree’s forty-fifth annual event in Burbank, California. In addition to getting the opportunity to meet some of the great NEHGS members who live in and around California, I also had an opportunity to give three different lectures: “Following the Crumbs: Tracing Family History Through Land Records,” “Tracing Your Italian Ancestry to the Old Country,” and “Tales of a Genealogist” at the NEHGS Breakfast. Continue reading What’s that name?