Category Archives: American-history

Outdoor classroom: Part One

Proof that fears and concerns still prevail six months after the country was plunged into lockdown, isolation and quarantine could be found in the empty streets of Plymouth on the day that eager Mayflower descendants and philatelists should have been lining up for the..

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The boy around the corner

127 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. (The Ayer family also owned 125, at right.) Photo by Bainbridge Bunting. Courtesy of Back Bay Houses/The Gleason Partnership

My grandmother[1] and her sister[2] grew up in the country, and both considered themselves countrywomen,..

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Summer spots: Part One

Even the birds are socially distancing at Crane Beach. August 2020

With this most unusual summer now coming to an end, my family of four spent a lot more time together and got to enjoy some outdoor spots within an hour’s drive from Boston. We visited several spots..

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Caring for the land

From the author's collection

Prior to my career at American Ancestors, I worked at the living history museum called Plimoth Plantation (now referred to as Plimoth Patuxet). For five years, I had the remarkable opportunity of learning and telling the story of the..

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Who were the Huguenots?

Courtesy of Findagrave

As any genealogical researcher with French ancestry knows, if you ever bring up those French forebears, the first question you’ll inevitably be asked is “Were they Huguenots?” But who exactly were the Huguenots? Where did they come from? And..

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Matrilineal mergers: Part One

Jefferson County, Kentucky Marriage Licenses and Bonds, 1810-1814, showing the 1814 bond between William Shake and Stephen Smith.

An “added” middle name is something that comes up quite a lot when seeing family trees online and can sometimes be difficult to detect...

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A 'no brainer'

I prefer to work on the Early New England Families Study Project (ENEF) sketches by myself, surveying literature, digging into primary sources, organizing, and immersing myself in the subject, so that I do not have to deal with teaching someone else to do things the..

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'If only you wouldn't explain'

"I might understand if only you wouldn’t explain."[1]

The contours of this year’s two hundredth anniversary of Maine’s statehood have been undeniably unexpected. Most anniversary celebrations here were cancelled or postponed, leaving most Mainers “celebrating” from the..

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Mother Orange

Courtesy of Chico News and Review

The skies are orange here today. Words like “contained” and “perimeter,” along with phrases like “mandatory evacuation” and “defensible space,” float through the smoke-laden air. The smoke curls indolently outward, towards the..

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ICYMI: A Lowell mystery

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 28 September 2017.]

One of the upcoming Early New England Families Study Project sketches is that for Richard Lowell of Newbury, Massachusetts. Richard was the son of Percival Lowell, who came to New..

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