Category Archives: Family-stories

The Boucher family reunion

This past weekend, about twenty-five of my Boucher cousins gathered to tour the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s show, “Making Music: The Banjo in Baltimore and Beyond,” with its three curators. Our visit to the BMI likely marked the first large-scale reunion of the..

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"Very impertinent": Elizabeth Chandler of Woodstock

Courtesy of Robert Lembke, Findagrave.com

Sometimes, the most interesting stories are found when you weren’t looking for them, as in the following example. I was searching for a simple marriage record in the town of Woodstock, Connecticut. While I eventually found..

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How I became a genealogist: Part One

I got a chuckle out of Bob Anderson’s preface to Elements of Genealogical Analysis, where he described his path to genealogy through military intelligence and molecular biology. It reminded me of the days back in the 80s and 90s when we belonged to a small group of..

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A code of ethics

Disclaimer: If you are a member of the Happ family of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, please read no further.

I think I’ve done something bad. I may never be invited to another Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll never be allowed to see my family again.

I think I just discovered that..

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"My ancestor was born ... where?!"

Detail, view of Saint Helena. Images courtesy of bweaver.nom.sh

One must always expect surprises when researching family history, because you just never know what you might uncover.

When researching my paternal ancestors, I discovered that our family had ties to one..

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Mapping Vermont

As part of the Society’s Ask a Genealogist service, I was recently asked about locating someone in post-Revolutionary War Strafford, Vermont. The time frame in which this person lived reminded me of the special considerations for this region, which was once hotly..

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Insights from my great-grandmother's diary

If your family is anything like mine, you heard plenty of stories about your great-grandparents from your parents. From those stories I have been able to get a sense of their personalities and how they lived, but it is a view limited to how my parents knew them as..

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The Le Roy family register

Here at NEHGS, we are always on the lookout for interesting genealogical books, pedigrees, or other formats for documenting family history. One of my first blog posts here covered the Society’s acquisition of a fascinating (and literal) family tree showing all of Queen..

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An unexpected helping hand

Marriage record for Robert Muir and Margaret Lavery. (Click on the images to expand them.)

Tracing one’s family back to their country of origin can be daunting; often the birthplaces found on census records are just countries, with no indication given of province or..

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Finding William Muir

The marriage of Frederick Muir and Mabel Lynch. (Click on the images to expand them.)

When I began working as a genealogist, my mother expressed great interest in learning more about her father’s family: the Muirs. While she had much information on her mother’s side..

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