David Allen Lambert’s April post on livelihoods inspired me to consider my own “family’s business.” In looking at my ancestry, one occupation pops up again and again and again: shoemaker. From Great..
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Recently, I had the pleasure of attending this year’s annual conference of the Massachusetts Library Association as a panelist for its Genealogy 101 discussion session. The goal of the session is to inform public librarians about how the staffs of..
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The Petty Sessions Court Registers are an invaluable source for Irish ancestral research. These court records are chock-full of fantastic information, and can offer a depiction of your..
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My father and his brother were the principal heirs of their father’s second cousin (and friend) Emily Bennett. As a result, a box of her papers ended up in my parents’ attic. The contents of the box included this undated and unattributed..
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A century ago today, on 7 May 1915, the Cunard liner R.M.S. Lusitania was reaching the end of her latest transatlantic voyage. The Lusitania left New York on 1 May with 1,266 passengers and 696 crew on board, bound for Liverpool..
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What is it with these genealogists? They’ve been researching for hundreds of years, published thousands of books and magazines, and still can’t get it right! In my last post, we left off with the question, “Can we trust nothing? must we verify everything from scratch?”
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Listen, my children, to my epistle Of the long, long ride of Israel Bissell, Who outrode Paul by miles and time But didn’t rate a poet’s rhyme...[i]
I was in Lexington the other day, conducting research in the town’s library. I was researching the Lexington Alarm,..
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The birth of the new Princess of Cambridge marks the latest addition to the main line of the British royal family: that is, the line closest in..
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A few months ago, we agreed that apostrophes do not belong in plurals: To make a plural, generally you add an s or es. No apostrophe. The same rule applies when you are referring to a decade, say, the 1920s. It is absolutely fine to put a letter after a number without..
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