Family History
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.
Family History
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.
Family History
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
Family History
The oldest thing this family owns that you can still pick up is a walking stick, and it corrected me.
Family History
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
Family History
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.
Family History
Seventeen words to four magistrates of Connecticut, and a sentence of fifteen stripes on the naked body — the woman the family forgot while it chased a governor.
Family History
Four words for her, eleven paragraphs for the men — and what her own hometown newspaper knew that her family’s historian did not.
Family History
A form letter, a mail-merge number, and a woman eighteen months dead — and what four hundred years of this family's given names say about where Americans decided they lived.
Surname Origins
John Culverd of Oxford held a cellar with a solar in 1279, and the jury that recorded it admitted three times over that it did not know how. An early bearer of the family name, honestly unconnected - and why that distinction is the whole method.
Family History
A departure this week from the eighteenth century: a family story that surfaced in the last few days, from correspondence with cousins of the Climax, Michigan branch and a week in the newspaper and census records. It reaches from Munger, in Bay County, to the village of Climax in Kalamazoo
Great Migration
The Dedham covenant of 1636, the sixty-eighth name on its roll, and the wheelwright grant that capitalized an ancestor - a family's American record verified, one counted column at a time.