Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
Mrs. Gray’s Easter Sunday entry [1] for 1865 is one of the longest in the diary. In it, she grapples with the sharp shock of President Lincoln’s assassination at the moment of the Civil..Continue reading
R. Stanton Avery Special Collections
Today’s announcement of the engagement of Prince Henry Charles Albert David of Wales and Ms. Rachel Meghan Markle reminds me of an interesting genealogical tree that recently entered the Society’s collection. Bought by D. Brenton..
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Today marks the one-thousandth Vita Brevis post since the blog launched in January 2014. The blog’s pages have been accessed more than one-and-a-half million times, and by my (not very scientific) count the following eighteen posts have led the field, read by more than..
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Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
The Confederate army was in full flight, with repercussions as far north as Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet even in triumph there were intimations of some fresh disaster; reading the..Continue reading
Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
At last the war’s end was in sight. In her homely way, Regina Shober Gray [1] manages to weave the domestic (“stooping over the old carpet on the backstairs”) with the martial (“though the..Continue reading
Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
It must have seemed to Regina Shober Gray [1] that the Civil War would never end, although there were signs, as here, of a looming resolution. In the second paragraph of this entry Mrs. Gray..Continue reading
As genealogists, we can become quite proprietary about our research – there can be a sense that our work on the far-flung branches of our family trees gives us a kind of ownership of the past. Recently, I’ve experienced another sort of ownership, that claimed by the..
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Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
We tend to think of a bright line dividing North and South during the Civil War, but in families like the Grays of Boston there were a number of living connections between the two regions...Continue reading
Courtesy Stadtarchiv Mannheim
[Author's note: This series, on the German origin of the Boucher family of Baltimore, began here.]
With regard to my great-great-great-grandfather Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Esprit Boucher (bp. 1799), I feel on firm ground in ascribing ..
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Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
The Civil War was drawing to a close, but there remained much suffering in store for Regina Shober Gray [1] and her circle:
61 Bowdoin Street, Boston, Sunday, 12 February 1865: Tomorrow..
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