This week’s theme is “When there’s a will there’s a way.” When I read it, my mind immediately focused on the word “will” instead of interpreting the phrase as overcoming adversity. As a genealogist, I love wills! Once you get through the legalese and the hard-to-read handwriting, wills can give a lot of insight into…
The theme for this week is “Heirloom” so I’m going to share something that doesn’t have its provenance proven yet. Passed down through my mother’s side of the family is this trio of silhouettes with some carving on the back. The silhouettes need reframing and a bit of conservation (I would love to be able…
2020 is the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower‘s arrival to the shores of what would later become the country of the United States. The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) has set up a special website to commemorate the event and share information about the Mayflower passengers. One of my cousins gave me a copy…
I feel almost like I’m cheating, writing about Ogden Talmadge again. He was mentioned already in an earlier post about his grandfather William Seward. The theme of this week though, is Names and he has one of my favorite names among my relatives. He got his name from his father Philander’s two lawyers who helped…
Since I missed a week, I’m going to keep numbering along with the 52 ancestors challenge calendar. This week’s theme is in the census. The first ancestor I thought of when I read that was my ancestor Patrick O’Brien who immigrated to Boston, Massachusetts from County Cork, Ireland. The only documents that I have both…
Today is the 259th birthday of the venerated Scottish poet Robert Burns, born in Ayrshire, in 1759. I had vague knowledge about Burns the poet for most of my life. I knew he wrote “Auld Lang Syne,” and that he was a famous Scottish poet. Then I found a photo of the headstone of one of…
The 52 Ancestors prompt for this week is Longevity. My first thought was to feature my 2nd great-uncle who was confirmed to have lived 105 years. I never met him despite his living past my high school graduation. The story was that he lived the last 20 years of his life in poor health. An…
The cedar chest from my grandparents’ house had been buried in the garage since my parents moved to their California house. For years I had wanted to open it and it wasn’t until we were preparing the house for sale that the garage was cleaned out enough to even find the box holding it. One of…
This week I signed up for a project called 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. The premise is simple: once a week choose an ancestor and write something about them. It doesn’t have to be a blog post, though that’s what I’ll be doing. It could be a tweet, a notebook entry, a page in a…
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are engaged! This event has inspired quite a few genealogy articles along with a representation of Ms. Markle’s family tree. Her father’s family goes back to Colonial times in Massachusetts and even further back to King Edward III (see chart here). When I saw the surname “Merrill” on the tree,…