Category Archives: Research-tips

"Remember your ancestors"

“Remember your ancestors.”

So read the words atop a family record engraved by Richard Brunton in the early 1800s. It is that admonition, which speaks directly to the NEHGS purpose, that led us to have an interest in Brunton – now the subject of a new book written by..

Continue reading

Overlapping generations

Margaret Steward (1888-1975) in 1961.

When I was born, I had two living great-grandmothers. The elder was my matrilineal great-grandmother, Pauline (Boucher) Glidden (1875–1964), whom I never had the chance to meet; the other was my paternal grandmother’s..

Continue reading

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) &..

Continue reading

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]..

Continue reading

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..

Continue reading

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..

Continue reading

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..

Continue reading

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..

Continue reading

A garden of red, white, and blue

Photo by Walt Doyle

On this Memorial Day Weekend every city, town, and village in America will have its commemoration. At NEHGS and AmericanAncestors.org, we are continually inspired by the annual Memorial Day installation that takes place on the nearby Boston..

Continue reading

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..

Continue reading