Category Archives: Spotlight

"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..

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Writing family history: Start small

Earlier this year, I read a blog post by the New York Public Library titled “20 Reasons Why You Should Write Your Family History.” Always on the lookout for new ideas to work into our seminars and webinars on writing and publishing, I read it eagerly. One particular..

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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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An historic event

At Saturday's Global Family Reunion

‪What an amazing opportunity it was to be part of the historic Global Family Reunion held in Queens, New York, on June 6, 2015, where I had the chance to meet NEHGS members, longtime friends and colleagues in the field of..

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Twenty-four degrees of separation

Thousands are expected to gather on Saturday, June 6, at the New York Hall of Science in Flushing Meadows, Queens, for the very first Global Family Reunion – founded by bestselling author A.J. Jacobs – who describes himself as “father of three, the husband of one, and..

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Behind the scenes in the Conservation Lab

The von Wolfframsdorff Armorial Family Tree

R. Stanton Avery Special Collections, NEHGS

To poke one’s head inside the Conservation Lab here at NEHGS is to observe a beehive of activity. This is where our Conservation Technician Deborah Rossi, part-time interns, and..

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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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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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