In the spring of 1917 my grandfather, aged 21, left college to become an infantry officer in the first wave of volunteers for what would be called the American Expeditionary Force in France; he was comissioned lieutenant in August and shipped to France the next month. He saw service in the heavy fighting in northeastern […]
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Wilbur Floyd Whiting (1919-2006) died just over a year ago, around Christmastime. He was my grandmother’s first cousin. His mother Mamie (Marie Henriette Lembke) was my great-grandmother’s baby sister, and she and her husband Floyd were always close to my great grandparents. Wilbur, their only child, was sort of an auxiliary sibling alongside my grandmother’s […]
Katrina Browne’s film Traces of the Trade has now been seen at Sundance, and Thomas Norman DeWolf’s book on the subject has now come out too: Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts its Legacy as the Largest Slave Trading Dynasty in U.S. History. This is a Rhode Island story, and a genealogical one. It’s […]
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
For the wonderful cousin in Capetown, Dawn Raimondo, I recently wrote up a brief report (not for publication) on the descendants of Vere Stapleton (on him see previously in this blog). Thought I’d post a separate link to it since I’ve been working on its style & format. Started in Microsoft Word, with a Word-to-html […]
Saturday, January 26, 2008
I can’t remember when I first held this up to the light. Maybe before, but maybe not until after cousin Dick had pulled a copy of the municipal record from the City of New York, showing a different date. Maybe before, but maybe not until after I had spent a year in European archives, carefully […]
Thursday, January 3, 2008
This is one of those amazing genealogical synergisms, and it has a moral: get your brick walls online. My wife’s great-grandmother Mary (Nye) Scott (1882-1965) — — came from an old Great-Migration family in Massachusetts, the Nyes. But her mother Cora
Thursday, January 3, 2008
This corpulent—and presumably tailless—Manx pretender gives American interest in premodern genealogy a bad name. Michael Andrews-Reading on his dedicated website, and other posters on the Usenet group rec.heraldry, have already reviewed the pretensions of David Howe. Much of what has been unearthed—even from Howe’s own pen—suggests that a profit motive may lie behind the patently […]
Thursday, January 3, 2008
My wife’s family has handed down to us an interesting trio of early case photos, Daguerreotypes, all meticulously well identified. But from my father’s family in Kentucky have come a couple that alas remain unidentified! One is a hand-colored Ambrotype under glass in a typical mid-19th century case (photo after the jump). Another image is […]
Saturday, December 8, 2007
I recently noticed a fresh hereditary society here in the United States, whose membership requirement is proof of descent from Merovech, the legendary founder of the Frankish royal dynasty, who would have lived in the mid fifth century if he were real: the Order of the Merovingian Dynasty. The website states that it was “conceived […]
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
I’ve known for a long time about the many duplications in my grandfather’s Gloucester ancestry. With the forthcoming publication of an article on the probable English origins of Thomas Riggs of Gloucester (d. 1722), I looked back at my database and realized that in nine different lines my grandfather descends from five (!!!!!) of his […]
