As I wrote in A Telluride story, my maternal grandmother Thelma and great-uncle Frederick MacLean were orphaned at ages 3 and 1, respectively, when their parents died six months apart in 1905–6. Their father’s unmarried sister, Cape Breton-born Christine MacLean,..
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[Author's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 9 September 2016.]
One of the trends in my ancestry is the curious one whereby, when given the..
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A recent review of my ancestral royal lines has suggested that they are all, in one way or another, problematic – either the line breaks here, in America, or there, in the British Isles. One approach I’ve tried, in a desultory way, is to..
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With Mother’s Day last Sunday and the wedding tomorrow of Miss Meghan Markle and Prince Harry of Wales, I thought I would write a post on some of her maternal ancestors. Often on Mother’s Day, genealogists consider their matrilineal..
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Before getting too far into a new Early New England Families Study Project sketch, I do some preliminary investigation. For example, if the family has already been treated in a sourced and reliable publication – such as a recent article in the Register – then there is..
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His name, Asa Schooley, seemed to jump out at me. It was a name I hadn’t been searching for, but there he was in black and white..
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I recently passed my first anniversary here at NEHGS, a year during which I spent a lot of time reflecting on my own ancestry as I researched the forebears of people with deep colonial roots in the United States. My..
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Josef Izsack’s case in the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) collection only spans one year, but it highlights an interesting tale spanning a longer period than twelve months. Deported after entering Boston as a stowaway..
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Do we really need to assess all the published resources we use in our genealogical research? It obviously takes time and effort to consider even the ten categories we are using for this experiment in “scoring” genealogies, not to mention that assigning numbers to..
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