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Category Archives: US genealogy

Magna Carta sureties: libertarians or robber barons?

Friday, July 30, 2004

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 […]

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Facing our Ancestors (in old photographs)

Thursday, July 22, 2004

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 […]

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In Old Rehoboth

Monday, June 14, 2004

Do You descend from Robert Abell? After three years of living in a nondescript suburb and caring little about the genealogy of place, I’ve been waking up to the history of my own neighborhood. Given my genealogical interests, I feel sheepish not to have looked into it earlier. The house we selected for convenience and […]

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The Willey Slide (with a royal descent to the victims)

Saturday, May 22, 2004

Lately I’ve been obsessed with the Willey Slide — the 1826 landslide the killed the entire Willey family, innkeepers in desolate but strategic Crawford Notch in the White Mountains, leaving their house intact—now called the Willey House, in the shadow of Mount Willey. There, on one hot summer day in the 1970s, I had my […]

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The Slave Women of Rumford

Monday, March 22, 2004

A graceful seventeenth-century churchyard — the Newman Congregational cemetery — lies near my house in Rumford. Formed in 1642 as the parish of Seacunke (soon renamed Rehoboth) in the Plymouth Colony, this parish grew and inherited the name of Rumford at the end of the eighteenth century, when other towns (including Rehoboth and Seekonk) were […]

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Gateway Ancestors

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

What is a Gateway Ancestor? In tracing any extended ancestry beyond, say, one hundred years ago, we see ancestors clumping into groups, sharing a single geographic location (perhaps the Connecticut Valley, or the Casco Bay area) or a common economic or ethnic identity (say, working-class Irish immigrants in New York City, or wealthy merchant barons […]

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Lulah (Ohio County, Kentucky)

Wednesday, July 4, 2001

I pull into Goshen Methodist Church, outside Beaver Dam, in Ohio County, Kentucky. It’s the first desination on a whirlwind, one-day excursion to the home county of my great-grandfather, who left about a hundred and ten years ago to find a better life in the big city—Louisville, sixty-five miles away.

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