While today a married woman going back to an earlier surname is not that uncommon, such a progression sometimes happened in earlier time periods. The following case was interesting, as this individual..
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Among the family photos, letters, and other memorabilia that my mother passed on to me are a group of Valentine’s Day cards sent to my great-aunt, Anna E. Johnson (1896–1990), who received them from her..
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Many of us have bunches of old family letters set aside to review – preferably with the sender and the recipient already noted on the envelope. Years ago, as I was researching my first family history (The Sarsaparilla Kings[1]), I was fortunate enough..
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[This series on royal cartes de visite began here.]
At left: The wedding of the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra of Denmark, 1863. Standing: The Crown Princess of Prussia, Prince Louis of Hesse, the bridegroom, and Princess Helena. Seated or kneeling: Princess..
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[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 2 May 2016.]
When I was..
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Two weeks ago, I was pondering the appropriateness of writing about my father on the anniversary of his death. Obviously parents are ancestors, but they’re so very close that I wasn’t sure whether it would be..
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One way genealogies can get items incorrect is when there are two individuals of roughly the same age with the same name and who have other identifying relatives with the same name as well. In this example, it gets further muddled as their..
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Our house has lots of dusty boxes that came from the houses of deceased family members. There’s the box of stuff from my father’s bachelor brother, William “Bud” Buzzell, who served on an LST during World War II and who sold me my first car for a dollar. There are..
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Another way to assess a genealogy is to consider the “scope” of its content. Few genealogies trace all descendants of a seventeenth-century New England couple through male and female lines to the present: just ask the Mayflower Society about their “Five Generations”..
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