Category Archives: Genealogical-writing

Related in many ways

William Chapin's bench

A nice example of genealogical good fortune came my way as a result of a past blog post I wrote regarding my search for family photos.

The comment, written nearly a year afterward, was from Nancy Chapin:

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Memories of things unknown

Ambrose S. Church (1861-1896)

Many family history researchers are hard-pressed to find personal information, photographs, memorabilia, or heirlooms to treasure and preserve. I am not one of them, and yet I seem to have a remarkable supply of “memories of things..

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A modern Wolsey

[Author’s noteThis series of excerpts from the Regina Shober Gray diary began here.]

Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
In August 1879, the Grays [1] were back in Massachusetts after their lengthy European sojourn, and Mrs...Continue reading

A good index guides the reader

Yesterday, Alicia Crane Williams wrote about the steps she takes when indexing the Early New England Families Study Project, showing the extensive work that makes it possible for us to find ancestors in database searches. But what if you’re not creating a database, but..

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Creating an index

I am in the last phases of preparing eight new Early New England Families Study Project sketches for publication on americanancestors.org in the next week or so. I will give full details about each in an upcoming post.

First, I have to create the indexes. Indexing a..

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Real photos

A few weeks ago, I went to one of the regular postcard shows that I frequent in the summer and came across a postcard that fills in a missing image in my family history. My entire postcard collection consists of images from Windsor Locks, Connecticut, where my Italian..

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'My ancestor the Indian Princess'

Pretty Nose at Fort Keogh in Montana (1879).

Many of us have family lore about an elusive Native ancestor somewhere far back on our family tree. Over the past year in Research Services we have received about a dozen formal requests to search for a Native ancestor..

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Are we having fun yet?

I am definitely regretting getting into the “ladies” sketches for the Early New England Families Study Project. While working on the sketch for William Lord of Saybrook, Connecticut, who had fifteen children by two wives, I recognized that his second wife also had at..

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Hunting for a church

The First Presbyterian Church of Chester, New York.

While working in the Ask-a-Genealogist questions last week, I found myself looking at questions on where to turn for records to prove the baptisms or residences of ancestors, which are actually rather typical...

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Italian emigration to one Rhode Island town

Courtesy of the New York Public Library

Growing up in Westerly, Rhode Island, a town in which more than 30% of residents identify as having Italian ancestry, I was always surrounded by Italian culture.[1] To this day, many people from other towns are surprised to..

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