They’ve been somewhat eclipsed by the eighteenth-century documents, but there is a large pile of newspapers that have come out of the floors and walls of the Allin house, mostly between layers of floors — a squeak preventative? There are a few sheets from Providence papers from the 1880s, and several full or nearly complete […]
Here is a ‘during’ shot from the Allin House: the Georgian fireplace surround from the ‘southwest great chamber’, partially buried in a later wall, has now been uncovered with the wall’s removal. The revealed corner of this pilaster and crown shows the thickness of the encrustation of paint, with peeks at earlier cream and blue […]
With kids out of school for the summer my opportunities for further deed research on the house are curtailed, but I did compile a full agnatic pedigree of the Barrington Allins, based on the deeds and wills, extant Barrington church records, the gravestones in the Allin Burying ground, and not least the 1947 typescript by […]
OK, here’s an amazing find, as selective demolition peels back layers of the Allin House. I have already blogged some of the scrap papers — farm accounts, legal memoranda, navigational trigonometry, surveying — pasted down to the vertical plank walls which survived in the ‘West Garret’ in our attic. This week, removal of the modern […]
Over the last month I’ve continued to burrow into the history of the General Allin house. The 1930 census had showed two families living in it, and deeds going back to the 1871 plat with a division line transecting the house showed that the west wing was separately owned. Now the ownership of the house […]
Recently I was delighted to find the Lane Family Papers online at the website of the Bedford [Massachusetts] Historical Society. I had known about the papers through Whitmore’s transcription of them, running serially in the New England Historical & Genealogical Register beginning back in 1857, since 2006, when I wrote a long article on a […]
Another revelation about our new old house. From the discovery of the amazing fifteen occupants in 1930, I knew the house had had its west wing rented out at the time. Further deed digging gave me a new conundrum: according to the town’s deed index, the owners of the house in 1930 seem to have […]
In 1930, our new house was pretty full. The census shows that Emanuel and Maria lived there with their eight daughters. Eight daughters. And, in the west wing (which back then boasted a separate street number) Ezra and Marian, renters, lived with three more daughters. Eleven girls. Maybe their ages & surnames were faked, and […]
A couple of days ago I posted on the eighteenth-century trigonometry homework on the walls of our attic. Now I have some pictures. The trigonometry, it turns out, was for the study of navigation. There are also legal papers and accounts, and the odd scrap of printing. I should explain the context you can see […]
I mentioned earlier the space within the central chimney complex in our house. The description we were given of it — as a ‘hidey hole’ — hardly does it justice, and it would have been a pretty sooty place to hide. It is a glorious smoking chamber with probably 40 to 50 wrought nails in […]
