The recent gift of some family photos reminds me that, well as in some ways I knew my maternal grandfather, there will always be things one cannot know, save by lucky chance. My grandfather was..
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As we are missing (most of) the 1890 Federal Census, the value of city directories for the years around 1890 is all the greater. Looking at the Boucher family of Baltimore, the 1880s proved somewhat chaotic, with the family shop and..
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I have been reviewing Baltimore city directories with a view to better understanding the movements of the William Boucher Jr. household during the nineteenth century. In 1860, the year of the Federal Census, my great-great-grandfather Wm. Boucher..
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In my previous blog post, I wrote about my Irish great-grandparents raising their children in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Yet as I began sorting through my genealogical research in preparation for NEHGS’ upcoming ..
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[Editor’s Note: Alicia’s series began here and continues here.]
Contested will
It is not often that a will is contested, but in the case of John Dickson, we have a nice, brief example.
John died on 22 March 1736/37, and by 4 April 1737 a formal petition had been..
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In September of 2014, I wrote a blog posted entitled “My ancestor was born ... where?!” about my family’s unexpected ties to Saint Helena, a remote volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean. My..
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Long before I loved genealogy, I fell head-over-heels for oral history. My great-grandfather, Everett Eames, died in 2005. By that time, I was nineteen, and had been regaled with stories of his years in the logging camps of..
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A recent Google search brought me to a page of links to various Baltimore city directories, and I thought it might be useful to make some..
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Whenever I, in another frenzy of research, dive into the bins of my family documents, artifacts, heirlooms, and memorabilia, I usually know what I’m looking for with little idea of what I’ll actually find, like my paternal grandmother’s herbal..
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