Category Archives: Serendipity

Kate's questions

Fred Stone (1873-1959). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Kate had questions. Her father’s family history, with its many connections to the Stone family of Hollywood, had been shrouded in mystery for years. She explained that it had been covered up through old family..

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"Grandfather Mustache"

Fred Athearn's official portrait for his second year on the University of California football team, 1899.

The 31 October edition of NEGHS’s Weekly Genealogist ran a quiz asking readers whether they had any ancestors who participated in organized sports as adults. It..

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Deep roots

Not long ago, when two names popped up on my Churchill family tree, they had the ring of familiarity. I probed my memory as to where I might have encountered them but just couldn’t place them until I noticed that this husband and wife are buried in Hingham’s High..

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Stolen identity

Every few months, we have a “Staff Research Night” at NEHGS, where staff members stay in the library after closing and work on their genealogy. Several of the staff genealogists assist staff members in other departments who might be new to genealogy or would like some..

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Finding Lempi's ring

Juho Matalamäki outside his house in Teuva, Finland.

Sometime in 2014 in eastern Finland, Toivo “Topi” Pränny was researching his great-great-grandfather, Juho Matalamäki. As a boy, Topi lived in what was once Juho’s house and had heard many stories about him,..

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Divine intervention?

My grandfather, later in life.

When the time comes for me to plunge into my Boston Irish Catholic ancestry – my Tierneys, Quinlans, Sweeneys, and Kellards – I intend to make full use of the Catholic parish records that are currently being digitized by the historic..

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'What could now sustain them?'

The 2020 commemoration for the 400th anniversary of the arrival in New England of the ship Mayflower and her passengers is fast approaching. In the next two years we will be hearing a lot of words quoted from Gov. William Bradford’s first-person account of the..

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Two souls

Gerard Dery

As we mark Veterans Day, I think of my ancestors who fought for our country. During my family search, I found that most of my ancestors didn’t arrive to the United States until 1870; we don’t have any early American soldiers in our family tree who fought..

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Forever Provincetown

Charlie Darby, Provincetown, ca. 1938. Courtesy of the Provincetown Beachcombers

For family historians whose ancestors may have been associated with the visual arts, the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art is a preeminent repository of primary sources..

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Who's Phebe?

When a man married two women with the same first name in colonial America and the early post-revolutionary United States, genealogical misidentifications become more likely since the wife generally took her husband’s name in all subsequent records. Children may get..

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