Theme is Military. Today is Memorial Day, made official in 1868 after the Civil War. I’ve known about two ancestors who fought for the Union for a while now; Solomon Gleason Barber, my paternal grandfather’s grandfather and Ora Butler Douglas, a 3rd great-uncle on my maternal side. Though some of my paternal grandfather’s ancestors moved…
This week’s theme (really last week’s theme) was “Storms.” I don’t have any family stories of storms at this time, though if I were to sit down with my ancestor Benjamin Morse Melcher’s ship log on microfilm, I’d probably find some mentioned. Instead, I’m going to write about a storm that came up in my…
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…
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,…
With my subscription to Ancestry, I have access to many official documents, like death certificates, that have so much more information than just dates. While researching Burdus Melcher for my last blog post, I decided to fill out his sister Emma’s profile in my records. Her death certificate is available on Ancestry and I found out she died…
