Wednesday, September 13, 2023
While preparing an architectural history presentation I am delivering for Barrington Preservation Society’s plaque program this week, I learned from my co-researcher on our plaque committee that this house we are studying was that of a bomber pilot killed in action in World War II (pictured; he lived there with his wife and mother-in-law, who […]
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
That’s what my four-year-old said when I told him (somewhat apologetically) where we were going. A chance encounter had led me to discover four new ancestors of my wife, who lie in the small burying ground by the beautiful Bradford Center meeting house in Bradford, New Hampshire, only five miles (by a dirt track through […]
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
I have been completely ground to a halt by the Liljenquist collection of Civil War portraits at the Library of Congress. Seven hundred cased photographic portraits of Civil War soldiers and sailors and their families — most of them anonymous — were donated last fall by the Liljenquist family, specifically the two boys, Jason and […]
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 […]
This has been a busy spring with little time for posting here. But one non-genealogical component of our family life has recently taken on a genealogical and historical dimension. We have just bought a new house — new to us, but built in the 1780s by a Revolutionary officer, Lieut. Col. (later Brig. Gen’l.) Thomas […]
Monday, September 21, 2009
Browsing somewhere online the other day, my eye jumped to a newly-published regimental history of the 10th Kentucky Infantry in the Civil War. This was the regiment of my great-great-grandfather Samuel Matlack (1815-1881), regimental quartermaster, then lieutenant and aide-de-camp on the staff of Brig. General Speed S. Fry, at Camp Nelson, Kentucky. Samuel and Mildred […]
I’ve now found confirmation of Captain (later General) William Crosbie’s place in the Anglo-Irish gentry Crosbie family which bore the swords-and-snake crest found on the pistols traditionally identified as Major Pitcairn’s (see my previous post, linked here). I had suggested that he belonged somewhere in the Ardfert Crosbie family found in Burke’s 1866 Dormant, Abeyant, […]
The first spoils of the Revolutionary War are surely the handsome pair of Murdoch pistols long attributed to Major John Pitcairn, who is said to have lost them on April 19 1775 during the harrowing return from Concord to Boston (they were variously said to have been in the baggage train, or on his horse). […]
I just rediscovered the digitized microforms of the Revolutionary War pension files (pensions granted from 1832 onward) available from ‘HeritageQuest’ via many subscription libraries (including the Boston Public Library, for Massachusetts Residents, and many other public libraries throughout the US). By my count my children have 39 ancestors listed in the DAR Patriot Index, of […]
Saturday, January 24, 2009
John Ross Delafield (1874-1964), a scion of New York’s pre-Gilded Age oligarchy, appears to have been the man who invented the 20th-century practice of honorary grants of arms by the College of Arms for the use of Americans of English (or British) descent. Delafield as a general; frontispiece to Delafield: The Family History, vol. 2 […]
