Category Archives: Research-methods

Collecting published accounts

This may turn out like watching sausage being made or paint dry, but let’s walk through the process of creating an Early New England Families Study Project entry.

We start with the entry from Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700:

NEWTON, Richard (–1701) &..

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Compiling the Great Migration Directory

In the fall of 2010 I was in the midst of researching and writing the seventh and final volume in the Great Migration second series. The publication of that volume in 2011 would mean that sketches had been published for all Great Migration immigrants from 1620 to 1635,..

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First Settlers of Connecticut

Other than Vermont, the five New England states had significant European-derived settlements in the early colonial period. In late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “genealogical dictionaries” were produced for the states of Rhode Island,[1] Massachusetts,[2]..

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Verify what? Part Two

Collect and compare as many different published versions of the subject as you can. Often there is one old surname genealogy and/or a “dictionary” of settlers. Then there will be some accounts of different branches in some “all-my-ancestors” volumes (often seen in..

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Tradition as deceiver

Courtesy of UConn Libraries.

I was recently searching The American Genealogist for information and found an article titled “Tradition and Family History.”[1] The article’s opening lines are: “Tradition is a chronic deceiver, and those who put faith in it are self..

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Into the garden

Statue of Aristides the Just in Boston's Louisburg Square.

When one is raised in Boston, one of the standard field trips in school is to walk the Freedom Trail. How lucky I was. Years later, when a family member moved to Beacon Hill, I became infatuated with this..

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A challenging environment: Alaska, 1900-1940

The use of dog sleds by census enumerators continued through the 1940 census. Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Archives (https://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/6935831853/)

The United States Federal Census is among the most frequently utilized resources..

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Something to love in Civil War pensions

First page from David Franklin's 1863 letter to his sister, from his Civil War pension file, application #236373.

Following up on my post last month regarding Revolutionary War pensions that can have troves of information, I remembered another subsection within..

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Surname maps for genealogical research

German surname images courtesy of Verwandt.de. Click on the images to expand them.

My nineteenth century immigrant ancestors have caused me a lot of headaches. With the exception of my Muir ancestor, Robert, who listed his specific birthplace, my immigrant ancestors..

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Verify what?

There appears to be a bit of trepidation among new researchers about what is meant by “verifying” sources. It probably sounds horrendously difficult, time consuming, and redundant, but it doesn’t have to be as hard as some would think – and any time spent spent..

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