Category Archives: The-well-stocked-genealogical-library

The earliest mass migration of the Irish to America

In Scotch Irish Pioneers in Ulster and America, his classic study of the eighteenth-century “Scots-Irish” exodus from Ulster to America, Charles Knowles Bolton cites court records, newspapers, correspondence and other primary sources. The book provides specific details..

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The threat of witchcraft

Our early New England ancestors were well acquainted with the threat of witchcraft. Dread of this phenomenon, and particularly of those in its thrall, was reinforced to them in warnings from clergymen about the dangers of falling in league with the devil. These fears..

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First steps in Western Massachusetts research

Although many Eastern Massachusetts colonial families have been well covered in print, the sons and daughters of those families who moved west are often lost to genealogists. The first stop on their migratory path was often in the woods of Western Massachusetts.

In..

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Westward migration from New England

When searching for elusive New England ancestors, locating where they may have moved within New England or beyond is critical. For example, a genealogist might have traced his Michigan family back to, say, a great-great-great-grandfather in Batavia, New York, in 1820,..

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A triumph of genealogical scholarship

For more than seventy years the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire – compiled by Charles Thornton Libby, Walter Goodwin Davis, and Sybil Noyes, and published between 1928 and 1938 – has been the first recourse for those looking to trace their..

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English port lists of the 1630s

John Camden Hotten first published The Original Lists of Persons of Quality his compilation of documents relating to seventeenth-century migration to New England, the Chesapeake, and the Caribbean more than a century and a quarter ago, and it remains one of our..

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The Well-Stocked Genealogical Library

To be complete, the well-stocked genealogical library should include general works on our research interests. Biographical dictionaries and other compendia are useful for looking at our ancestors’ contemporaries and their activities; they often provide clues for..

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