I was at the office of the fabric conservator at RISD when we pulled apart the frame. She was doubtful, since she had seen many of these things simply glued to some sort of acidic backing. But no, this one was actually just stitched to a piece of cardboard and was remarkably supple and stable […]
Years ago my grandmother had this in her room. Written over its oval paper mat were (left, middle, right): “Mamie; Uncle Johnny; Mother.” Her mother, Martha Sophie Lembke, was born in October of 1868. Aunt Mamie was not born until 1878. Uncle Johnny, the oldest, was born back in 1864. The problem is that everybody […]
Here’s an interesting item: Count Rumford’s grant of arms from the English College of Arms: This is from a fine on-line article on Count Rumford: Allen L. King, “Count Rumford, Sanborn Brown, and the Rumford Mosaic,” Dartmouth College Library Bulletin 35, New Series (1995). I see this is one of those modern grants taking notice […]
Just yesterday I got back from conservation and framing a commission in a colonial militia given to one of my wife’s ancestors at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. The commission is typeset with blanks filled in by hand. I give the whole text here [filled-in portions, as opposed to typeset boilerplate, are in […]
On another page, I have offered a genealogical definition of my children’s identity based on their seize quartiers, or their sixteen great-great-grandparents. Here is another form of such a definition. For persons predominantly or even partially descended from colonial lines in the United States, one shorthand for the ancestry is those people who are traditionally […]
I finally did it today: I completed plotting, on an outline map of the continental United States, the places lived in by the first seven generations, in the male line, of my Taylor family, descendants of Richard Taylor, who died, testate, in 1679 in Old Rappahannock County on the Northern Neck of Virginia. Looking at […]
When President George W. Bush used the word ‘Crusade’ in a speech about fighting terrorism on September 16, 2001, handlers and spin-doctors interjected quickly to disavow the loaded language. To speak of ‘Crusading’ was rightly perceived as antagonistic to the U.S. and global Muslim community—a group which at least some in the current U.S. administration […]
One of the most pleasing of lineage societies has long been a fixture in my head, since as a child I watched endless ranks of minutemen file past on the Patriot’s Day parades each April 19 in Lexington, Massachusetts: the ‘Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company‘ of Massachusetts. Does ‘honorable’ necessarily belong with anything ancient, or […]
I broke down and had my copy of James Anderson’s Royal Genealogies (second printing, 1735) rebacked five years ago, but told the binder to retain the interesting bookplate which was there when I bought it: the bookplate of the ‘Magna Charta Library’ of the ‘National Society Magna Charta Dames’. It has the arms of the […]
Three Daguerreotypes sat in the box with a make-up compact, a pill box, and little cut-glass dish, and two sandwich bags filled mostly with coins from Vichy France. The box was addressed to ‘Nathaniel Taylor, Historian’, and sent by my wife’s aunt. I had never looked seriously into old cased photographs, though in my own […]
