Category Archives: Brick-walls

Making the skeletons dance

An offending hospital bill

In his 1930 novel Immaturity, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.” Shaw had a point with that statement. While we can deny them, hide them, or ignore them, we can’t..

Continue reading

Chasing a squirrel

A squirrel![1] I find a lot of them while researching and I am sure all other researchers find them, too: those pieces of information that have nothing to do with what you are researching. You come across them by accident and they pull your attention away from what you..

Continue reading

Northeastern University's roots

Courtesy of Northeastern University

Genealogy is the never-ending story of your ancestors as you track them down and learn about the lives they lived. It is also the opportunity to learn about the communities in which they resided. Recently, I had the opportunity to..

Continue reading

Browse the images online

Click on images to expand them.

Often, when I’m looking at records on FamilySearch.org, I find source records in two categories: 1) “Browsable” (images only, no searching capability), or 2) “Searchable” (abstracted with various fields from the record). Sometimes,..

Continue reading

Middlesex County court records

Some of Roger Touthaker's testimony.

When researching a family, one can quickly become focused on names, birthdates, and death dates. It is easy to get caught up on going as far back as possible until reaching the metaphorical brick wall, and being left with a..

Continue reading

An untapped genealogical resource

Courtesy of The Patten Lumbermen's Museum

Long before I loved genealogy, I fell head-over-heels for oral history. My great-grandfather, Everett Eames, died in 2005. By that time, I was nineteen, and had been regaled with stories of his years in the logging camps of..

Continue reading

"On the most reasonable terms"

The main monument in the Boucher plot at New Cathedral Cemetery in Baltimore County. Photo courtesy of Constance Burch McGrain

A recent Google search brought me to a page of links to various Baltimore city directories, and I thought it might be useful to make some..

Continue reading

Baseball's Biography Project

Courtesy of Wikimedia.org

A total of 18,337 men have taken the field throughout the history of Major League Baseball (18,663 if the National Association is counted as major league, a point of contention among baseball historians).[1] Under their “Baseball Biography..

Continue reading

Coming home

The area around Tufts College in Medford, 1889.

Recently, I moved from my hometown of Dedham to Medford, Massachusetts. I never really thought about it, but I had always assumed my family had no connections to places north of Boston. My mother and her siblings grew..

Continue reading

Tracing your African roots at NEHGS

The Old Plantation. Courtesy of Wikimedia.org

From tracing free people of color in New England to identifying former slaves in the deep south, NEHGS can help you tell your family story. We have a number of guides and tools in our library and available through our..

Continue reading