While to us the Civil War ended suddenly, over a period of days early in April 1865, for Regina Shober Gray [1] it still dragged on at the end of the month:

61 Bowdoin Street, Boston,..

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Regina Shober Gray’s [1] account of the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination continues, although a hint of the return of normal life appears at the end of her 23 April entry.

61..

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Mrs. Gray’s diary entry [1] for Easter Sunday 1865 continues.

61 Bowdoin Street, Boston, 16 April 1865: Vice President Johnson[2] was sworn into office yester’y morning in place of our..

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Mrs. Gray’s Easter Sunday entry [1] for 1865 is one of the longest in the diary. In it, she grapples with the sharp shock of President Lincoln’s assassination at the moment of the Civil..Continue reading →

A previous post about former President John Quincy Adams and his son visiting Nantucket listed their dining partners at a..

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The Confederate army was in full flight, with repercussions as far north as Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet even in triumph there were intimations of some fresh disaster; reading the..Continue reading →

A while back, I wrote about the hotel in Marshalltown, Iowa run by my great-great-great-grandparents, which I like to fantasize might have been called..

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The month of January 1865 brought further deaths to Mrs. Gray’s [1] circle, but also allowed her a welcome respite in visits to local galleries to see the latest paintings.

61 Bowdoin..

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This July marks the 250th birthday of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States and an original member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Born on 11 July 1767 in Braintree, Massachusetts, Adams was a passionate orator and ardent..

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Last month, I wrote about the tradition of given names. I postulated that given names were either chosen by parents because they honored a family member (both living and deceased) or because parents liked the way a name sounded,..

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