Category Archives: Critical-analysis

Honoring a Civil War veteran

My great-great-great-grandfather, Elijah Dickinson, enlisted in Union Army in 1862. He was joined by both of his brothers, Atwood and James, as well as their sister’s husband, Nelson Cohaskey. The four of them served in Vermont’s 6th Infantry. Elijah died of disease..

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A marriage in the Savoy Chapel

Is this Ann Naden (bp. 1742)?

While researching the provenance of a family portrait, I recently revisited the research problem posed by my ancestress Martha (____) (Naden) Mortier, an Englishwoman who came to New York before the American Revolution with her second..

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Creating an index

I am in the last phases of preparing eight new Early New England Families Study Project sketches for publication on americanancestors.org in the next week or so. I will give full details about each in an upcoming post.

First, I have to create the indexes. Indexing a..

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Real photos

A few weeks ago, I went to one of the regular postcard shows that I frequent in the summer and came across a postcard that fills in a missing image in my family history. My entire postcard collection consists of images from Windsor Locks, Connecticut, where my Italian..

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Remember the ladies

Courtesy of Findagrave.com

Over the years I have had the honor of corresponding with veterans from the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. But I must admit that corresponding and talking with some of the last widows of the Civil War was a highlight..

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A mappa mundi

The Society's copy of the Mappa Mundi. Photo by Dani Torres

The Society has, hanging on its walls, a reproduction of the famous thirteenth-century Hereford Mappa Mundi, the original of which is in the collection of Hereford Cathedral in the west of England. A mappa..

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A Midwestern femme fatale

Image courtesy of the Kokomo Tribune.

We have a tendency to envision our ancestors as upstanding members of society. In some cases, they were. In others, they were anything but. I first stumbled across Belle Gunness while researching the Midwestern ancestry of a..

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'My ancestor the Indian Princess'

Pretty Nose at Fort Keogh in Montana (1879).

Many of us have family lore about an elusive Native ancestor somewhere far back on our family tree. Over the past year in Research Services we have received about a dozen formal requests to search for a Native ancestor..

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Are we having fun yet?

I am definitely regretting getting into the “ladies” sketches for the Early New England Families Study Project. While working on the sketch for William Lord of Saybrook, Connecticut, who had fifteen children by two wives, I recognized that his second wife also had at..

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'Supposed to be upright and prosperous'

[Author’s note: This series of excerpts from Regina Shober Gray’s diary began here.]

Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
While their European sojourn during the summer of 1878 represented a break from routine, the Gray party ..Continue reading