When editing an article for the Mayflower Descendant, I try to look for references the author might have missed, which, in turn, can sometimes lead down a rabbit hole of further information only tangentially related to the article at hand. The following concerns an..

In my last post (in a footnote), I gave a summary of presidents with Mayflower ancestry. Readers called attention to the fact that some of the presidents were grouped by descent from a male passenger,..

Researchers unfamiliar with the history of the New England Historic Genealogical Society may assume women have been members since the organization’s founding in 1845. In fact, for the first fifty years, women were denied membership. In 1894, some members began to..

One of my great-grandmothers[1] was a penniless orphan, the kind found in storybooks: beautiful and, secretly, a dispossessed member of a once proud family. As often happens when a child’s parents die young, much..

March is women’s history month, which makes me think of my favorite women’s history..

Regina Shober Gray kept a diary for 25 years. Taking a smaller portion of the diary – the period between 1861 and 1870 – and with a focus (for Women’s History Month..

Regina Shober Gray kept a diary for 25 years, through the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, through the deaths of several of her siblings and, in 1880,..

I’m in the middle of doing some research for a lecture that I’ll be giving in April at NEHGS entitled “The..

The role of women in America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not confined simply to matters within their households, as some have..