Category Archives: Family-stories

Royal cartes de visite

Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, from 1876 Empress of India (1819–1901), and Albert, Prince Consort of Great Britain (1819–1861).

As a collector of photographs, I am drawn to faces: the hints of personality in an unflinching gaze or a sidelong glance...

Continue reading

A missing Merrill

Gravestone of David Merrill (1768-1859). Courtesy of Findagrave.com

Alicia Crane Williams’s post earlier this week – about when an incorrect item was “published in a book” – is quite fresh in my mind as I contemplate a current genealogical problem. Last week I wrote..

Continue reading

A family affair

Workshop of Hans Holbein the Younger, Queen Jane Seymour (1508?-1537). A great-granddaughter of Sir Philip Wentworth and Mary Clifford, she was the third wife of King Henry VIII. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

One of the features of the recently-announced engagement..

Continue reading

A special relationship

Do you have a special attachment to one ancestor? I do, and she was a source of curiosity and amusement even before I started investigating my family history in earnest.

During a move ten years ago, I uncovered a (mostly correct) pedigree chart for my father’s side of..

Continue reading

The grafting trunk

The clickety-clack of my great-grandmother’s ‘old lady shoes’[1] resonated as I toddled after her down the narrow hallway to the old trunk. There, in that back bedroom she and I would sit in the dark brilliance of polished woods, with the old trunk somehow beckoning us..

Continue reading

'There is no try'

Currier and Ives' "The Road, Winter."

As a family historian, you can’t help but love the holiday season. It’s a time for reconnecting with extended family, and an excellent opportunity to share everything that you have learned about your ancestral past. With a bit..

Continue reading

A royal engagement

R. Stanton Avery Special Collections

Today’s announcement of the engagement of Prince Henry Charles Albert David of Wales and Ms. Rachel Meghan Markle reminds me of an interesting genealogical tree that recently entered the Society’s collection. Bought by D. Brenton..

Continue reading

'To have his family around him'

George H. Folger joins the holiday mix.

As a genealogist, I have so much to give thanks for. Soon after I started my genealogical quest, I discovered that the Nantucket Historical Association had correspondence from my great-great-great-grandfather[1] in their..

Continue reading

Alternative facts

I recently read one family historian’s method for gleaning her father-in-law’s stories: she would write questions on slips of paper and put them in a Mason jar. When her father-in-law visited, he’d choose one slip and question from the jar, and she would write down..

Continue reading

Fadeaway

John Alfred Young (1890-1960), ca. 1935.

I’ve always wanted to know more about the life of my great-grandmother Opal Young (1895–1978). To do this, I decided to see what researching her siblings might reveal about her. By and large, information about her siblings..

Continue reading