Daily Genealogist

Our latest blog profile features Filiopietism Prism, written by John D. Tew, who wrote an article for the fall 2011 issue of American Ancestors magazine, “Echoes from the Dorr Rebellion: The 1842 Aplin/Carpenter Correspondence.” (NEHGS members can read the article online.) Here, John introduces his blog:

Filiopietism Prism went live on New Year's Eve 2012. It was inspired byNutfield Genealogy, and a generous invitation from its author, Heather Wilkinson Rojo, to contribute a guest post in February 2012.

I have been interested in my family history since I was a teenager. My initial interest came from discovering that the “Rhode Island Pirate,” Thomas Tew, hailed from Newport, where my ancestors resided. Although various sources have linked him to my ancestors, no proof has been found and I continue to pursue all new leads. After this original encounter with genealogy, I began to slowly and sporadically collect family information and photographs in file folders and boxes. Following the birth of our two sons, my interest deepened and got more organized. This, coupled with a general interest in history, prompted me to begin writing a family history and eventually led to the decision to start a blog.

Filiopietism Prism is largely focused on my New England ancestry because both my paternal and maternal lineage go back to the early colonization of New England - the Mayflower on my mother's side and the 1640 arrival of the Tews to Newport, Rhode Island on my father's side. The blog allows me to share information, photographs, and resources I have accumulated and reach out to others who have similar interests. It has also led to the discovery of a few distant cousins.

I like to explore lost traditions I have discovered through my genealogy pursuits (such as May baskets). I also have developed two regular features: Saturday Serendipity (which passes on interesting genealogy and history reads) and Samaritan Sunday (which presents stories of strangers helping strangers with genealogy-related assistance).

Vermont Civil War Sesquicentennial Website
by Lynn Betlock, Editor

Readers with Vermont ancestors — or those interested in the history and culture of the state — should explore the resources available at the Vermont Civil War Sesquicentennial website. It offers a ten-page PDF, Vermont & the Civil War: A Visitor's Guide, which “describes 46 places to visit. The guide will take you to New England's best documented stop on the Underground Railroad, the factory where the gun milling machines that armed the nation were produced, and the resort where Mary Lincoln and her children summered in 1864.” The site also includes links to information about various aspects of Vermont's Civil War history as well as a link to the Vermont Historical Society's page on Researching the Civil War from a Vermont Perspective.

Those interested in pursuing the topic further will want to investigate a new book by Howard Coffin, Something Abides: Discovering the Civil War in Today's Vermont. “Coffin takes the reader through every town in the Green Mountain State to document more than 3,000 sites that were in some way touched by the Civil War and are extant today. Not a theme-park guide to quaintly preserved structures, the sites identified here are homes where soldiers lived and died, hospitals where they were treated, and halls where abolitionists spoke passionately.” Howard Coffin is also the author of Full Duty: Vermonters in the Civil War.

One Colonial Woman's World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit (2012), by Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, “reconstructs the life of Mehetabel Chandler Coit (1673-1758), the author of what may be the earliest surviving diary by an American woman.” Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, Coit permanently settled in New London, Connecticut, when she was fourteen.

Coughlin, who spoke at NEHGS in February, described her search for Mehetabel's diary in an article, “Mehetabel Chandler Coit: Finding ‘Her Book’” in the spring 2013 issue of the online journal Common-Place. To track down the diary, which had been cited in an 1895 book, Coughlin was relentless in her pursuit of every lead, and persisted long after most would have given up the search. Genealogists will appreciate Coughlin's tenacity and her ultimate success. More information about Mehetabel Chander Coit - and Coughlin's upcoming appearances in Massachusetts - is available at onecolonialwomansworld.com.

Last week's Ask a Genealogist column on researching Yugoslavian ancestors by Libby Feil prompted a number of responses from Weekly Genealogist readers. Here is a sample:

Kathleen Poznick of Weatherford, Texas: The recent article about immigrant relations from Yugoslavia brought to mind my trouble in locating my husband's father and grandparents in the census. They also were from Yugoslavia and, after meeting in upstate New York, moved to Michigan. Try as I might I could not locate my father-in-law in the 1920 census in Detroit, even though I knew he was born there just three years before. Luckily my husband actually remembered their address (they lived there for 40+ years) so I searched that way. We found them! First names and ages matched but the last name was completely off. We were searching "POZNICK" and I had tried various ways of spelling but it was under "POHEZK," not even close to what we had been searching. Area researchers might want to note that a large community of Yugoslavians who settled in Cleveland, Ohio, had their own newspaper. The person searching could also try the Yugoslavia message board on Rootsweb or one of the Rootsweb groups focusing on the successor states created after the breakup of Yugoslavia: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro.

Elizabeth Dutton of Boalsburg, Pennsylvania: Here are my suggestions for the Eastern European research problem: Try to locate and contact the ethnic church(es) and cemeteries that served the area; search line by line through the 1920 census (if it's Detroit, maybe try the relevant and nearby wards); and, if a visit to the location is not possible, work through microfilmed indexes to vital records, probate, property, etc.

Greg Crane of Athens, Georgia: Perhaps the person who asked the question might be desperate enough to do what I was forced to do to find one of my wife's great-grandparents. It's very time consuming, but the success is so satisfying. I did a systematic search by first (given) name. With a name like George, and all the possible variants, it might be too difficult but it is worth considering.

On Tuesday, May 7, three NEHGS publications were honored with New England Book Show Awards: Genealogist’s Handbook for New England Research, 5th Edition;Western Massachusetts Families in 1790; and the NEHGS Book & Gift Catalog 2012/2013. The New England Book Show is an annual juried show that recognizes the year’s most outstanding work by New England publishers, printers, and graphic designers. Winning books are selected for their design, quality of materials, and workmanship.

Last week, at the 2013 NGS Family History Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, Helen Schatvet Ullmann received the National Genealogical Society’s Award for Excellence: Genealogy and Family History for her book, Some Descendants of Roger Billings of Dorchester, Massachusetts (Newbury Street Press, an imprint of NEHGS, 2012). This award recognizes a significant contribution to genealogy that serves to foster scholarship and advance excellence in family history.

If genealogists researching Boston ancestors aren’t familiar with the work of Annie Haven Thwing (1851-1940), they should be. Born in Roxbury (now part of Boston), Thwing “devoted over thirty years of her life to painstaking historical research on early Boston. According to Thwing, her interest was sparked by a desire ‘to find out where my ancestors lived, who were their neighbors, and what the neighborhood was like.’ Only Thwing did not stop with her own ancestors; she set out to answer these questions for all of Boston. Focusing on analysis and synthesis of primary sources, Annie Haven Thwing created several indispensable and accessible resources for historians.”^[1]

“When Annie presented her research collection to the Massachusetts Historical Society in December 1916, it consisted of twenty-two typewritten volumes of Boston deed extracts entitled ‘Inhabitants and Estates of the Town of Boston, 1630–1800,’ a two-volume ‘History of the Streets of Boston, 1630–1800,’ and the Thwing Card Index. This last comprised approximately 125,000 index cards, with all the ‘items of interest of each inhabitant’ she had compiled arranged alphabetically by name. That index, still much used by researchers and now the foundation of an electronic database, fills seventy-four library drawers at the Massachusetts Historical Society.”^[2]

In 1920, Thwing drew on her research to publish the book for which she is best known today, The Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston, 1630–1822. In 2001, the Massachusetts Historical Society and the New England Historic Genealogical Society collaborated on a CD, Inhabitants and Estates of the Town of Boston, 1630–1800 and The Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston, 1630–1822, that includes the Thwing Index and contains more than 62,000 records. (The CD is available for purchase here.)

While many genealogists are familiar with Annie Haven Thwing’s scholarship, they might not be aware that she also created a model of Boston that can still be viewed today. “In 1900, the Massachusetts Infant Asylum, a charitable organization for which Annie served as one of the directors, planned a fundraising fair. Typically, Annie decided upon an ambitious project for exhibition: an accurate scale model of the town of Boston, ca. 1775, based largely on the information she had amassed…Annie was no modeler, however, and time was short, so the model had to be reduced to a…modest five and a half feet by four and a half feet. The outline and topographical features were drawn from a map Annie had commissioned for the book she planned to write. For the model buildings, Annie turned to a carpenter named Munsey living on Orr’s Island, Maine, where she passed her summers…Munsey worked from pictures supplied by Annie Thwing…[and her] model featured the eighteenth-century street pattern she had so carefully reconstructed and nearly 120 handcarved building replicas. In addition to the acclaim it received for its appearance at the fair for the Infant Asylum, the Thwing model also received appreciation in a city exposition in 1909. In December of that year, Annie gave the model to the Old South Association, where it resides as a popular exhibit to this day.”^[3]

Built in 1729 as a Puritan meeting house, the Old South Meeting House is best known as the site of lively public meetings in the years leading to the American Revolution, including the meeting that led to the Boston Tea Party. At the time, Old South was the largest building in Boston. Today, Old South is a museum, a Freedom Trail site, and an active gathering place. (Old South is also a center for history education, as I witnessed last week when my children and their third grade classmates took on the roles of Loyalists and Patriots and debated the tax on tea.)

Annie Haven Thwing left a rich and invaluable legacy for Boston genealogists, historians, and institutions — and it all began with a simple desire “to find out where my ancestors lived.” For a detailed look at Thwing’s life, I highly recommend Len Travers’s article, cited below.

¹Lynn Betlock, “Annie Haven Thwing: Guardian of the Crooked and Narrow Street.” The Dial of the Old South Clock 7 (spring 1995): 1.↩

²Len Travers, “‘You see I am addicted to facts’: Annie Haven Thwing and The Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston,” The Massachusetts Historical Review 1 (1999): 121–122.↩

³Ibid., 120–21.↩

The Dorr Rebellion was a watershed event in Rhode Island history. Events began in 1841, when Providence native Thomas Wilson Dorr sought to expand the numbers of Rhode Islanders eligible to vote. At the time, with the Charter of 1663 still in force, less than fifty percent of white male Rhode Islanders were eligible to vote. Historian Marvin E. Gettleman, author of The Dorr Rebellion: A Study in American Radicalism (1973), wrote that "The most dramatic and bitter battle of the antebellum period took place in Rhode Island, where the movement for political reform took a radical and even revolutionary character."

The fall 2011 issue of American Ancestors magazine featured an article on the Dorr Rebellion: "Echoes from the Dorr Rebellion: the 1842 Aplin / Carpenter Correspondence," by John D. Tew. (NEHGS members can read the article online.)

I recently became aware of the Dorr Rebellion Project website, which is a terrific resource for anyone interested in the crisis. The website includes a nineteen-minute documentary, interviews with expert scholars, an image gallery, and links to relevant articles. Organizations and individuals involved with the project include Providence College; The John Hay Library, Brown University; The Rhode Island Historical Society; The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; The Rhode Island School of Design; and Russell DeSimone.

Our latest blog profile features AncestryInk, written by Jane Sweetland. Here, Jane introduces her blog:

As an adult, busy raising my family on an island off the coast of Massachusetts, I wasn’t interested in local history or family ancestral stories. An avid interest in maritime history, however, pulled me into other branches of historical research. Eventually I became associated with an underwater salvage team out of Provincetown searching for the wreck of a silver-laden ship belonging to Charles I that went down in the Firth of Forth. Researching shipwrecks in Edinburgh and St. Andrew’s in Scotland captivated me. As I discovered, history and genealogical research are inseparable. And the tales provided by captain’s logs, church records, and old cemeteries are exciting! I relentlessly pursued connecting the dots, closing circles, and finding how the lives of quiet, local people intertwined or made a difference as larger historical events unfolded around them.

An unresolved family mystery ultimately led to the creation of my blog AncestryInk: I had no idea who my great-grandfather was. Everyone in the family refused to talk about him. He was like Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter books: “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” My great-grandfather was a Scot from Maine, a man of the sea who reportedly had “a woman in every port.” That was all I knew. My research took me well over two years. I drew from the resources of Facebook, original family letters, the NEHGS research library, NEHGS and Ancestry online databases, Maine libraries and historical societies, Maine cemeteries, Family History Library microfilm, and much, much more.

I found that my great-grandfather, a master mariner who sailed between Nova Scotia, Maine, and Pennsylvania, married three times, and fathered ten children between 1882 and 1920 - even though he was on the high seas almost continuously! One of his wives divorced him, his second and third marriages may have been bigamous, and he abandoned many of his children. I found plenty of evidence for why he might not have been spoken of.

A desire to expand my research skills during this process prompted me to enroll in the Boston University Genealogical Research Program. I gained so much valuable information that I felt moved to share what I was learning by creating AncestryInk. A secondary interest in photography seems to mesh nicely with blog writing and, I hope, enlivens the experiences and information shared there. I discovered I come from a long line of seagoing folks and island inhabitants, and I am currently working on a project about an 1846 shipwreck off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard involving my ancestors.