I am in the last phases of preparing eight new Early New England Families Study Project sketches for publication on americanancestors.org in the next week or so. I will give full details about each in an upcoming post.

First, I have to create the indexes. Indexing a..

I am definitely regretting getting into the “ladies” sketches for the Early New England Families Study Project. While working on the sketch for William Lord of Saybrook, Connecticut, who had fifteen children by two wives, I recognized that his second wife also had at..

There are any number of reference books with information about when and how the towns of Massachusetts were incorporated. One is Historical Data Relating to Counties, Cities, and Towns in Massachusetts, by Paul Guzzi, Secretary of the Commonwealth, published in 1975...

In the Early New England Families Study Project sketch for Joseph Andrews of Hingham, I included a commentary about the problem I was having establishing the birth order for Joseph’s children. Recently, an inquirer wondered why I had not used the order the children are..

Some photographs of our ancestors are beyond price. This one of my mother’s father, Ed Hawes, was taken in 1899, when he was still planning on a Naval career. Unfortunately, as a midshipman, he was thrown down a hatch in a hazing incident that shattered his hip.

Ed,..

Many discoveries in life are the result of serendipity – wandering around until one falls over something one wasn’t looking for.

I pulled an all-nighter this week while working on the Early New England Families Study Project sketch for Jonas Clark of Cambridge. I had..

Every family has a story about its origins, particularly about how the immigrant(s) came to the New World. Often these stories can seriously stretch credibility, but we can accept them as folklore if not fact. We do not often think about tracking down the origins of..

Memorial Day comes with many family duties. In our family, although I am now the only one who lives in the state where the bulk of our family members are buried, the duty falls on my brother and his wife, who come up from Florida for the summer and stay with her..

The Babson Historical Association is preparing an updated Babson Genealogy for publication in 2017. The Babsons are unique in several ways.

First, they are one of the few families descended from a Great Migration matriarch who came to New England without a husband...

Looking at one’s family at any particular point in time can be educational. Recently, I was interested in 1881 because three of my grandparents were born that year and the fourth was born in December 1880, which is close enough. I was wondering what their parents would..