The Family Business
Run a finger down the records asking what they did for a living: bread, beer, wheels, shoes, land, flour, cheese, shirts, and the telephone — three centuries of the licensed trade a town cannot do without.
A Mason's Sign at the Rope
In the first days of November, 1814, on a hilltop above Waterford in Norfolk County, Upper Canada, two middle-aged millers stood under a great oak with a rope over its limb. The rope was already around the neck of one of them. Around them sat a column of mounted
Divided Again
On the twenty-eighth of August, 1813, in the second summer of the war, Captain Nesbitt Collver of Townsend township sat down and made his will. Listen to this post 0:0015:20 ▶ Listen to this post read aloud (MP3, 15 min) Subscribe:Apple PodcastsSpotifyAmazon MusicMore apps He was thirty-
The Germans Next Door
Vanita Johnson Engelbrecht died in the small hours between Saturday and Sunday, the twenty-ninth and thirtieth of August. She was my father's eighth cousin — the two of them the same number of generations down from a couple who lie in unmarked ground on a New Jersey mountainside
The Covenant, Signed Twice
In 1636 a wheelwright signed a covenant at Dedham, sixty-eighth on the roll. In 1791 his great-great-grandson organized a covenanted church in the Pennsylvania wilderness. One hundred fifty-five years, one revolution, one sedition conviction — and the same instrument, signed twice.
The Lost Family Register
In 1832 an old soldier swore he had seen his birth on the family register of his father's family — and could not say what had become of it. On the registers this family lost, refused, and should not have trusted.
The Two Colonies
There is a small lake in Mount Arlington, New Jersey, that the modern map calls Lake Rogerene. Listen to this post 0:0018:42 ▶ Listen to this post read aloud (MP3, 19 min) ▶ Listen to this episode Subscribe:Apple PodcastsSpotifyAmazon MusicMore apps Almost nobody who drives past it could tell
The Jabez Staff
The oldest thing this family owns that you can still pick up is a walking stick, and it corrected me.
Twenty Moheags
In March of 1676 — March 1675/6 by the reckoning then in use, when the year turned in late March and a winter month carried two dates — the Council of Connecticut sat at Hartford answering letters from a colony on fire. King Philip's War had burned through the
The Schoolteacher's Census
In 1857 the office of the Norfolk Messenger, the newspaper at Simcoe, printed a slim pamphlet with an immodest scope and a modest author. The scope was everything: A Sketch of the County of Norfolk, Canada West — Canada West being what Ontario was called between 1841 and Confederation — undertook to
The Historian Was One of Them
Last week I told the story of Sarah Culver, who stood up in the county court at New London in November of 1719 and told four magistrates that they were an adulterous generation and that God would find them out, and was sentenced to fifteen stripes upon the naked body
The Collvers Go West
A message from Oregon began with a recitation of five generations. Setting it beside the records took a day — and turned up Gabriel Collver's probate file, a letter from the Coos River folded inside it, and an inheritance routed through Wall Street to a young man with no permanent address.