Readers have asked for Early New England Families Study Project sketches for the ladies. Because genealogy is traditionally oriented to the male surname – and if a wife has only one husband – “reversing” his sketch for her would not include any more information. With..
Continue readingAnyone who has researched genealogy knows that names can be spelled many different ways across a variety of records. I once found twelve different spellings of one family’s surname during a research project here at NEHGS. Recently, in my own personal family research,..
Continue reading →There is much serendipity in genealogy: more than once I have pulled a book off the shelf in the library at NEHGS, intrigued by the title or perhaps the binding, only to find within its covers the answer to a vexing research question or a story that sheds light on a..
Continue reading →Among my husband’s family papers is a letter, dated 25 October 1873, from John Dill to his mother, Susan (Berry) (Dill) Gibbons. John had left the family home in Springfield, Illinois, earlier that year to work on the railroad in Texas, and he was..
Continue reading →Yesterday, Scott wrote about genealogical complexity: addressing all the different ways we make modern families and write about them genealogically. As it turns out, many family historians ask questions about just such things:
- How do I talk about a child born out of..
When I started out as a genealogical writer, I followed the model of genealogies published earlier in the twentieth century. The genealogical world they depicted was an orderly one, with generation after generation born in one place, married in another,..
Continue reading →A by-product of finishing a project and publishing the results is that one moves on – without necessarily losing interest in the subject matter. I spent about five months immersed in the study of my great-grandfather Edward Hughes Glidden’s architectural oeuvre,..
Continue reading →Now that my book on genealogical research methods (Elements of Genealogical Analysis) is out, I have turned my attention to the series of lectures I will be delivering in October and November; these, in turn, will form the basis for a future book entitled Puritan..
Continue reading →I could easily go up to the seventh floor here at NEHGS and find a lot of my ancestry in published genealogies, but my research interests have gone in a different direction: I have spent close to the last six years researching the..
Continue reading →