I recently went searching through newspaper records for information about the family of John Doane of Eastham for the next Early New England Families (ENEF) sketch. Newspaper resources about 17th- and 18th-century families are rare, but do exist for larger cities such..
Continue readingAnyone who lived in Fall River, Massachusetts more than fifty years ago would..
Continue reading →Are there ghosts in your family's stories? Do you have a relative who enjoys telling a tale of the unexplained, an ancestral home that seems to hold some trace of the..
Continue reading →Following the example of his mother Queen Elizabeth II, the new monarch of the United Kingdom has officially..
Continue reading →As family historians, we often feel inexplicably drawn to certain ancestors in our family trees. Sometimes it’s clear why we are drawn to a particular individual—other times, it’s harder to say...
Continue reading →The myths and stories in any family history are tenuous things. Often self-serving, they mesmerize us—trapping us in visions of the past filtered through glossy hindsight..
Continue reading →As anyone who as ever spent time doing genealogical research can tell you, searching through historical records can oftentimes feel like a little bit of a treasure hunt. When I noticed an unusual headline..
Continue reading →An occasional project I have worked on is compiling a list of “near- Mayflower” families. These are families who were not on the 1620 voyage themselves, but most or all of whose present-day descendants share Mayflower ancestry. There are easy cases at the first or..
Continue reading →Even before I earned my master’s degree in public history, I liked to fancy myself a bit of a family historian. I am lucky enough to still have three living grandparents: ages 86, 89, and 94. I have taken up the task of..
Continue reading →The story of Thomas Dalton is a tragic one, and one that had been forgotten for many years, until a DNA match brought the truth of his brief life to light. I stumbled across the Dalton family years ago when investigating the origins of my own 2nd great-grandmother Mary..
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