Category Archives: Smack-down

An alter-ego's tale

Groucho Marx:"Well, whaddya say girls? Are we all gonna get married?"

Woman: "All of us? But that's bigamy!"

Groucho: "Yes, and it's big-a-me, too."

Researching the collateral relatives of my great-great-grandfather John Henry O. Record has brought a host of..

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Riding the rails

My great-great-uncle John Young (1857-1946).

I am nearly finished going through all the family pictures, papers, and heirlooms inherited from my parents. But, I wonder, will the task ever be truly finished?

Photos were the first to be sorted. Photos are relatively..

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Freelove and Giggles

See a larger version below.

The American Genealogist (TAG) has frequently published amusing short items found in the records, often as “filler” for the lower half of a page. Following up on my post about the Geer and Christophers families of Connecticut, the last..

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Family lore

Images courtesy of Reynold’s Newspaper, Sunday, 22 February 1891.

After my son was born, I developed an interest in finding out more about his father’s surname, Sadler. Not much was known about the origins of the Sadler line, since my boyfriend and his siblings did..

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Clandestine marriages

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Recently I was researching marriage records in Vermont and was reminded of the existence of Gretna Green towns in Colonial New England in the mid-eighteenthcentury. It turned out some English customs were just too convenient to leave..

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The Harvard Polo Club

with her father-in-law Campbell Steward, on the steps of the Steward house in Goshen, New York.
File this one to “You never know what you might find…”

I have written before about my great-grandparents’ house in Goshen, New York, built on land that had belonged to the..

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Tree begone

As a custodian of Our Old House, I’m always conscious of how to maintain it and still make twenty-first-century changes without drastically altering or (gasp) destroying the historic integrity of the property. Making those decisions is not always easy, especially when..

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A case of mistaken identity

German Evangelical Home in 1925. Eugene L. Armbruster photographs and scrapbooks, v1974.001, courtesy of the Brooklyn Historical Society.

My grandmother, Emma Mueller, never really knew her father. Her mother, Marica Michelic Muhvic, a widow – born in Stari-Tsg,..

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"Miss Winters in the drawing room"

The drawing room in question.

Several months back, Chris Child and I started playing a game we’ve dubbed "Genealogical Clue." Playing a good game of it can be quite fun and challenging. Largely, it’s a game whereby we attempt to locate an individual in our..

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Peart's Elixirs

The rasp of her son's cough hadn’t stopped for a fortnight, and it seemed (as Mrs. Hatton would later write) that there was “no medicine on earth that could reach his disease.”[1] It was terrible to watch him wasting in his struggles. There certainly was no ease or..

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