Category Archives: Family-stories

Mid-century migration from Iraq to Mexico to the United States

The Records of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Boston Office at the American Jewish Historical Society, New England Archives, http://digifindingaids.cjh.org/?pID=365459#a1

While interning at the American Jewish Historical Society—New England Archives and..

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Picking families for the Early New England Families Study Project

My father, borrowing a line from Henry Ford, used to tease me that I could pick any color apple I wanted in the basket “as long as it was red.” (They were all red.) I have been asked to explain how I choose which families to do for the Early New England Families Study..

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An interview with Marilynne Roach: Part One

Photo by Joyce Kelly

Marilynne K. Roach will lecture tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the New England Historic Genealogical Society (99-101 Newbury Street  in Boston). Marilynne’s most recent book is Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the..

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Changing my expectations, one search at a time

Expectations are tricky. As genealogists, we should always be on the look-out for new information, recognizing that the data sought may be in a different location, or format, or offer different content than we had expected.

Lately, as I’ve mentioned, I have been..

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“Check or cash … gratefully received”

I am currently at work processing the Farley Family Papers, a large collection that includes hundreds of letters, photographs, estate records, and military records created by several generations of Farleys in Massachusetts. The wide variety of documents found in the..

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Clear cutting in the genealogical forest

When I was in school thirty plus years ago, there was a lot of discussion about the differences between history and genealogy – usually with genealogy getting the short end of the stick. The gap between historians and genealogists narrowed once we realized that we all..

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Beautiful Detroit

Arthur Belforti is shown at left

A current research preoccupation of mine is a photo of my maternal grandfather, Arthur David Belforti (born Achille Alessio Riccardo Belforti, 1902-1996), which my mother recently gave me and which is pictured here. Having had a..

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Tips for online genealogical research

I frequently encounter eighteenth- or nineteenth-century dates, especially on the migration trail, that are not cited and which often derive from “online trees,” usually the FamilySearch Ancestral File, Rootsweb WorldConnect, or Ancestry World Tree. These days, I find..

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The first year of the Early New England Families Study Project

It is just a little over a year since NEHGS President and CEO Brenton Simons came to me with the idea for what became the Early New England Families Study Project. I was immediately interested, not only because it is an important institutional project, but because it..

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Musings on seventeenth-century Puritans

Lately, I have been reading Tom Webster’s Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c.1620-1643. Much of this volume is built around Thomas Hooker’s time in Chelmsford, Essex, in the late 1620s. One of my goals is to document in detail and..

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