Tag Archives: The Well-Stocked Genealogical Library

Fifty years on Newbury Street

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Reading Room Ashburton Place
The Reading Room at 9 Ashburton Place. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections, NEHGS

On 14 December 1964, NEHGS opened its doors to members at 99–101 Newbury Street for the very first time. The building on Newbury Street is the Society’s seventh home since it was founded in 1845, and this location has served as our headquarters during the greatest period of growth in our history. In the fifty years since arriving in the Back Bay, our membership has increased from 3,000 to an active constituency of more than 70,000; our library print collections have grown from 30,000 volumes to more than 250,000 volumes; and our endowment has improved from approximately $1 million to more than $25 million.

Continue reading Fifty years on Newbury Street →

Heading north

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pioneers me and nh-29386In my previous post, we took a look at some of the resources available for researching ancestors who moved beyond Massachusetts, with a focus on westward movement. Many also headed northward to current-day New Hampshire and Maine, although the area – as the frontier of English colonization and under threat of attack from the French and Indians – was not settled as quickly or densely as Massachusetts during the seventeenth century. According to NEHGS Trustee David Watson Kruger, Pioneers of Maine and New Hampshire, 1623–1660 by Charles Henry Pope is an “important primer on early Maine and New Hampshire families.” Continue reading Heading north →

Successive generations moving west

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FirstSettlers-25377As the first settlements in seventeenth-century Massachusetts colonies became more established, and as various reasons for becoming restless or disenchanted within them developed, people began their forays beyond the known. In Genealogical Notes: First Settlers of Connecticut and Massachusetts, Nathaniel Goodwin covers families in such Massachusetts towns as Cambridge, Concord, Lynn, and Northampton and such early Connecticut towns as Windsor, Wethersfield, Simsbury, and Hartford. Continue reading Successive generations moving west →

Great Migration resources

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PioneersMA_front-cover-mock-upOn Wednesday, we took a look at the books that are part of the Great Migration Study Project, which are key resources for genealogists and for people researching their own early New England ancestors. Just where did Robert Charles Anderson find the data to undertake his massive project? NEHGS Editor-in-Chief Scott C. Steward notes that Anderson “mined earlier published and unpublished compilations for lists of immigrants to New England, tirelessly cross-checking them against the surviving colony, county, town, church, probate, and deed record to create living portraits of seventeenth-century New Englanders.” Continue reading Great Migration resources →

Thanksgiving, a history we all share

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Pilgrim Migration softcoverThanksgiving is a holiday that prompts many of us to imagine, based on the history we’ve learned from childhood, what it was really like at the first Thanksgiving in 1621. It’s a story all Americans share, regardless of whether our ancestors were already living here in 1620, were among those who arrived on the Mayflower, or were counted as part of the multitude that followed in the coming decades and centuries, for Plymouth Colony set the stage for the America in which we now live. Continue reading Thanksgiving, a history we all share →

Barber’s History and Antiquities

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Barber coverThese days, it is easy to find information about any location in the world by typing in the place name on one’s personal computer from the comfort of home. The digital search results can even include high-resolution images of the desired site and its immediate vicinity. However, delving into the past of a place is not as easy, and for this activity the printed book can convey not only information but context. The History and Antiquities of Every Town in Massachusetts is a historical travelogue of Massachusetts for the modern researcher. Its author, engraver and historian John Warner Barber, gives his historical perspective of the towns and cities of Massachusetts from their respective beginnings up until the time of the volume’s publication in 1839. Continue reading Barber’s History and Antiquities →

Banks’ Planters of the Commonwealth

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Planters-of-the-CommonwealthIn genealogical research, discovering the names of ships on which immigrant ancestors came to the New World is interesting  not only as a discrete fact, but because it can often be a clue for further research. As there was a tendency for members of communities to travel together, knowing the names of ships and the places of origin of the ships’ passengers is helpful in understanding the composition of communities and revealing where to search for related, elusive ancestors.

Unlike more modern listings of passengers for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, compiled by the shipping companies in official ship manifests for departures and arrivals, for the seventeenth century no such official ship passenger lists were created. Continue reading Banks’ Planters of the Commonwealth →

Witches Brew: Part Three

Family Stories,

Witches Rakes and RoguesMemorable for her encounter with Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Mistress Hibbins was not simply a figment of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s imagination. Long a controversial woman in Boston, she was a real person who in May 1656 was sentenced to death for the crime of witchcraft. The widow of an affluent merchant and office holder, Ann Hibbins was, in the words of historian Samuel Adams Drake, a “person of superior quality in life,” and not, as the popular imagination conceives of a witch, a “wretched hag.” Continue reading Witches Brew: Part Three →

Witches Brew: Part Two

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Witches Rakes and RoguesAlice Lake of Dorchester became the second person tried and executed in Boston as a witch. While few details of her offenses survive – she was executed circa 1650 – she had two potent strikes against her: she had committed fornication prior to marriage, and she was reputed to have killed an infant she was carrying.

In 1673, Ann Martin Edmonds, a healer from Lynn with Boston associations, appeared before the Court of Assistants on witchcraft charges, but here the script changes. Continue reading Witches Brew: Part Two →

Witches Brew: Part One

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Witches Rakes and RoguesOvershadowed by the hysteria that gripped the townspeople of Salem in 1692, Boston’s considerable witchcraft record has received relatively little attention. From the late 1630s to the 1690s, the town intermittently fell into witch-hunting fervor as accusations coalesced around individual women. (Men in Boston were seldom the subject of witchcraft accusations.) In all, four local women were convicted and executed in Boston witchcraft trials. Their stories – and the stories of other accusations that did not end in execution – reveal aspects of long-forgotten Boston history and the perils of life in a puritanical society that believed in the possibility of such events. Continue reading Witches Brew: Part One →