Thursday, December 8, 2011
After two years since the last upload, I’ve finally uploaded a minor revision of my Taylor book. I think I will be working on it forever. Notable things in the last two years still haven’t made it into the book — the success of our triangulation of a DNA profile for Simon2 Taylor, and the […]
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
[10/19/11: OK, this has now been made public, so I will post:] The Saturday of Columbus Day weekend, about lunchtime, came a terse e-mail from a genealogist I’d met once, six years ago at Salt Lake City, but know better by reputation. “What’s yer phone number?” Shot it to him quick (with a sentence or […]
Friday, September 23, 2011
OK, so Julie has had them for years now: Connecticut ancestors. And it seems like every other New Englander with whom I perform the parlor trick of finding common ancestors has them too. But until now, I have not had any — my New England ancestors all lived north of Boston. My single solitary Connecticut […]
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Here’s something that seems to have flown under the radar. A 1993 book, Historical and Architectural Resources of Barrington, Rhode Island, reproduced two fine old maps, from 1851 and 1870, demonstrating the growth of this town, especially since a railway station was put in at West Barrington in 1868 and development of farmland into bayside […]
Prudence Island: our Allins came to Barrington from there before 1680; and the story goes that in the winter of 1682, Narragansett Bay froze solid enough for William1 Allin to haul his house over it (presumably minus the stone-end chimney), a few miles up the bay from Prudence to Annawomscutt in West Barrington. Now it’s […]
One update after last Wednesday’s talk. The night before, fleshing out a slide show, I went back up to the attic to look at the 1798 Federal direct property tax valuation page pasted on the partition wall under the eaves, and took a closeup of what I realize is Thomas Allin’s signature, since it is […]
A clinched nail, tip curled like a snail, caught in the low afternoon sunlight coming through the 18th-century window at the west end of the attic, last November. I’ve hardly blogged at all since we moved in January. I’m finally going through and organizing hundreds of photos taken during the course of our renovations, while […]
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 […]
Part of the long process of settling into any house seems to be the endless shifting of stuff in basements, attics and garages. This sunny weekend I extracted from the basement an enormous pile of old storm windows — full height wooden sashes, mostly two over two, the style of the ‘modern’ replacement windows which […]
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
As of Monday, two households of stuff have now been moved into the Allin House, leaving two tides of debris in the basement — — the second tide so large that our troglodyte feline has actually become ceiling cat. Sure enough, she was watching me, last night, as I tried to make some sense of […]
