Category Archives: Spotlight

World wide Italian immigration

The Museo Nazionale Emigrazione Italiana in Rome

When we think about Italian immigration here at NEHGS, it is often because the patron we are helping is looking for ancestors who arrived here in the late 1800s or early 1900s. However, Italians immigrated to many..

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A suspicious first cousin

My mother's grandfather and her aunt

One day a few years ago, my mother (who was 85 at the time) got a phone call from a young lady who said “Hello, I think I’m your cousin!” Mom, who was well aware of and always on the lookout for scams, immediately assumed that..

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Calculating age at death - and why

Griffith Thomas' gravestone in the Ebenezer Baptist Church Cemetery, Bluemont, Loudoun County, Virginia

Instead of identifying a person’s date of birth, death certificates and gravestones sometimes identify the deceased person’s age in years, months, and days. But..

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Excerpts from Martha Anne Kuhn's diary, 1836

Drawing dated 12 July 1836

Martha Anne (Kuhn) Clarke kept a diary in 1836, while a student at the Temple School in Boston. The series of excerpts began here. In this installment she writes of her last days at school and the beginning of a trip out to the western..

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Online family histories, old and new

The NEHGS Digital Library and Archive has a growing collection of family histories, covering a wide range of subjects and surnames. Roughly three quarters of the 137 titles currently in the collection are older books from the stacks of the NEHGS Library – usually..

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The Horace Augustus Knowles Papers

The “Manuscripts@NEHGS” column in the Spring 2014 issue of American Ancestors contains extracts from each of the three collections processed by interns for the R. Stanton Avery Special Collections during the Fall of 2013. The collections were the Burnham Family Papers..

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Excerpts from Martha Anne Kuhn's diary, 1836

Martha Anne Kuhn's diary, 1836

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

“It’s so dreadful to be poor!” sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.

“I don’t think it’s fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and..

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Tiptoe through the tombstones

Click on the images to expand them

When I first began researching at the NEHGS Library, I was drawn to the wide array of cemetery records that could be found in published books and donated manuscripts. It’s not by choice that I spend time locating cemetery records;..

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Ear marks and horse censuses

In the days when livestock mostly roamed loose in New England towns, it was critical that farmers could identify which animals belonged to them – to avoid disputes, identify stolen property, or recover damages if your crops were ruined by the neighborhood’s hogs. While..

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What's that name?

Courtesy of Ancestry.com

I just returned from representing the New England Historic Genealogical Society at the Southern California Genealogical Jamboree’s forty-fifth annual event in Burbank, California. In addition to getting the opportunity to meet some of the..

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