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
"Mother Cary" (Betsey Swain Cary) as drawn in 1860 by David Hunter Strother under his nom de plume “Porte Crayon."
A while back, I wrote about the hotel in Marshalltown, Iowa run by my great-great-great-grandparents, which I like to fantasize might have been called..
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From a modern perspective, we might think that women had no legal rights in the “old” days, but there actually were many ways in which women were legally protected. For example, husbands could not abandon wives and families (although one had to catch the husband to..
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Elizabeth (____) Sturgis's letter, in the Winthrop Family Papers, 1537-1990, at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Captain Daniel Patrick was a well-known and powerful figure in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of 1640. He had been a “common soldier in the Prince’s..
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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
George Anson Jewett’s NEHGS membership form.
Recently, Jennifer Jewett Dilley of Des Moines, Iowa, reached out to the Publications office at NEHGS to discuss permissions for a project. Jennifer explained that her father Gerald Anson Jewett Jr. is “92 years young,”..
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It is a situation nearly everyone who has done any degree of genealogical research has encountered before. Upon locating information on one of your ancestors and doing some simple subtraction, the result just seems too unlikely.
“There is NO WAY he was 138 when he..
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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
John Symonds, "Genealogical Register with Coat-of-Arms of the Phippen and the Smith families of Salem, Massachusetts," 1808, detail. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Anna Augusta Chapin Fund
When I compiled the Early New England Families Study Project..
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The extended Hawley family.
Early in my genealogical research, I noticed that one of my great-great-grandfathers, Cicero Hawley,[1] was enumerated in 1870 on the same page as the family of his future wife. That piqued my curiosity. Checking out the census form more..
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