The Search for Hannah Hobart’s Missing Husbands

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..

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A Tale of Two Brayton Descents

Home of John Summerfield Brayton, built ca. 1870, once stood at 369 Highland Avenue, Fall River, Massachusetts. Photo from author’s copy of “Fall River, 1911, A City of Opportunity.”

Anyone who lived in Fall River, Massachusetts more than fifty years ago would..

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Call for Stories: Family Ghosts

Photo from "Hours with the Ghosts or, Nineteenth Century Witchcraft" by Henry Ridgely Evans, 1891

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..

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Regnal names in the U.K.

Queen Elizabeth II, the Duke of Edinburgh, King Charles III (then Duke of Cornwall), and Princess Anne, October 1957. Source: Library and Archives Canada

Following the example of his mother Queen Elizabeth II, the new monarch of the United Kingdom has officially..

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Discovering the first life of my second-great-grandfather

Jacob Spuhler, his second wife Johanna Weigert, and their five children

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...

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Tracing a tall tale: was Elvis really in the building?

Blue moon, you saw me standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own...

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..

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Mr. John Griffin and the Boston Common Treasure

Detail of 1814 map of Boston Common by John Groves Haley.

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..

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Let it snow!

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..

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Finding the family historian in my own family history

Interviewing my grandfather about his life

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..

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Uncovering Thomas Dalton’s Tragedy

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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