Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
We tend to think of a bright line dividing North and South during the Civil War, but in families like the Grays of Boston there were a number of living connections between the two regions...Continue reading
Nancy Dickerson Welch
A recent quiz in The Weekly Genealogist asked readers to share the nature of any secrets they’d uncovered about their ancestors. More than one third of respondents indicated that they had not uncovered any secrets – to which I say, “Hah! You..
Continue reading
The New York Times, 12 June 1942. Click on the image to read the article.
As those who have applied to hereditary societies may already know, several groups have a policy of requiring every birth, marriage, and death certificate for the most recent three generations..
Continue reading
Mary Elizabeth (Kraus) Ogle (1886-1970)
There is a remote area in the study of family history. Some will call it a myth, or say it has no proper place in the field of study. It hides from anyone who would study it like a registrar, and rarely cloaks itself in any..
Continue reading
Courtesy Stadtarchiv Mannheim
[Author's note: This series, on the German origin of the Boucher family of Baltimore, began here.]
With regard to my great-great-great-grandfather Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Esprit Boucher (bp. 1799), I feel on firm ground in ascribing ..
Continue reading
The Whitaker family in 1930.
Is truth really stranger than fiction? I’ll let you be the judge. Out of the blue, I received a lengthy message this summer from a woman in Phoenix, through ancestry.com. Here’s an abridged version:
“Hello. Based on your family tree, I..
Continue reading
The red boxes mark the neighboring townlands in which the Holland families lived. Courtesy of National Library of Scotland
Recently I was researching my Holland surname line and ran into an interesting problem. I found two men named William Holland, each of whom..
Continue reading
Recently, after completing – without hospitalization or arrest (for significant abuse of a power tool) a major painting project involving thirty-five exterior louvered house shutters attached to My Old House – many people asked me how old the vinyl shutters actually..
Continue reading
Courtesy of Maps.com
One of my ‘favorite’ brick walls (talk about an oxymoron!) is that of my great-great-great-grandfather Stillman Burr. He is reported born in Massachusetts circa 1797,[1] married Zeruah Kenyon at Woodstock, Vermont in 1817, and is believed to..
Continue reading
Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
The Civil War was drawing to a close, but there remained much suffering in store for Regina Shober Gray [1] and her circle:
61 Bowdoin Street, Boston, Sunday, 12 February 1865: Tomorrow..
Continue reading