Vita Brevis

[Author’s note: This series of excerpts from the Regina Shober Gray diary began here.]

In 1880, Regina Shober Gray [1] became a grandmother (in January) and a widow (in February). The Gray..Continue reading →

Many family history researchers are hard-pressed to find personal information, photographs, memorabilia, or heirlooms to treasure and preserve. I am not one of them, and yet I seem to have a remarkable supply of “memories of things..

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[Author’s note: This series of excerpts from the Regina Shober Gray diary began here.]

With the end of the summer in sight, I thought I would finish up this review of the Gray diary between..Continue reading →

My great-great-great-grandfather, Elijah Dickinson, enlisted in Union Army in 1862. He was joined by both of his brothers, Atwood and James, as well as their sister’s husband, Nelson Cohaskey. The four of them served in Vermont’s 6th Infantry. Elijah died of disease..

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[Author’s note: This series of excerpts from the Regina Shober Gray diary began here.]

In August 1879, the Grays [1] were back in Massachusetts after their lengthy European sojourn, and Mrs...Continue reading →

While researching the provenance of a family portrait, I recently revisited the research problem posed by my ancestress Martha (____) (Naden) Mortier, an Englishwoman who came to New York before the American Revolution with her second..

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Yesterday, Alicia Crane Williams wrote about the steps she takes when indexing the Early New England Families Study Project, showing the extensive work that makes it possible for us to find ancestors in database searches. But what if you’re not creating a database, but..

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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..

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A few weeks ago, I went to one of the regular postcard shows that I frequent in the summer and came across a postcard that fills in a missing image in my family history. My entire postcard collection consists of images from Windsor Locks, Connecticut, where my Italian..

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[Author’s note: This series of excerpts from the Regina Shober Gray diary began here.]

For those of us wiling away the summer in offices in the United States, yearning for a glimpse of blue water, here is a living portrait of a Swiss summer..

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