From the Experts

Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston

2012-04-03T05:50:00Z

Editor of the new book, Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston by Hannah Mather Crocker, Eileen Hunt Botting guides readers through Crocker's 180-year-old recollections of Boston.

Hannah Mather Crocker's Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston (c.1822-1829) is a 600 page manuscript history of Boston from the 1620s to the 1820s. It has been preserved at NEHGS since 1879, and is now available in a comprehensive scholarly edition.

Crocker was one of the most important women's rights advocates of the early republic. She was also well-connected in Boston's political circles, as the niece of colonial governor Thomas Hutchinson and the grand-daughter of the Rev. Cotton Mather. Her unique history of her native city takes a topographical approach, guiding the reader on a walking tour of the streets, squares, alleys, wharves, and smuggling tunnels of old Boston. She provides eye-witness accounts of the political conflicts of the revolutionary era, including the Stamp Act riot of 1765 and the Siege of Boston of 1775-1776. Her focus on the families, homes, and built environment of the city in the long eighteenth century makes the book a great resource for genealogists, family historians, and historians of Boston.

Giving a fresh perspective on early American religious and political history, she shows the connections between church and state in the colonial and provincial eras, the splintering of Congregationalist churches, and the rise of minority churches such as the Baptists, Roman Catholics, and Universalists. Crocker's history of Boston also pays heed to the voices and stories of women, serving as a bridge between the oral traditions of several generations of local women and the written historical record.

The Reminiscences has three parts: two versions of her history of Boston plus an appendix of related literary and historical documents. The volume, particularly the appendix, contains the largest known collection of Crocker's own poetry. Crocker creatively wove her own poetry, as well as poetry about Boston and by other Bostonians such as Joseph Green, Mather Byles, and Phillis Wheatley, into both versions of her history of the city. Writing with humor, patriotic spirit, and a sense of urgency as she neared the end of her seventy-seven years, Crocker penned her Reminiscences with the intent that it would inform and inspire the "rising generation'' of American citizens to understand and appreciate the roots of their rights and freedoms in the political struggles of the colonial, provincial and revolutionary eras.

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Eileen Hunt Botting is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and author of Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family (SUNY Press, 2006).

Interview with Joseph Carvalho III

2012-04-03T02:55:00Z

Joseph Carvalho III, author of the new edition of Black Families in Hampden County, Massachusetts, 1650-1865 (NEHGS), recently appeared on "Connecting Point" to discuss his genealogical research and the importance of western Massachusetts in African-American History.

Black History Month, part two from WGBY on Vimeo.

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Joseph Carvalho III, M.A., M.L.S., and Certified Archivist, recently retired as the President and Executive Director (1994–2010) of the Springfield Museums in Springfield, Massachusetts. He served as Associate Editor of the Historical Journal of Massachusetts (1978–2003), and as the Book Review Editor of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly (1987–1996). In 1996, Joe received the National Award for Advancing Genealogical Research Publications from the National Genealogical Society. He is the author of numerous articles in historical and genealogical journals, and he co-edited reference works such as The Guide to the History of Massachusetts (1988), Dictionary of American Medical Biography (1985), and Labor in Massachusetts: Selected Essays (1990). He has also served as the executive producer of many historical video documentaries, including Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Development of African American Churches in Springfield: 1840s-1890s (1992). Owner and operator of Watershops Studio in Springfield, Joe recorded the audio CD for the Enchanted Circle Theater’s theatrical production Sojourner’s Truth (2011).

New from Roger Thompson

2012-01-17T16:18:56Z

Roger Thompson's newest book, From Deference to Defiance: Charlestown, Massachusetts, 1629-1692, recreates the lost world of 17th-century Charlestown and the lives and work of the first three generations of its townspeople. By using a variety of surviving records, Thompson presents a colorful history of the town’s settlement and governance, its relationship with the land and sea, the church, local crime and violence, the role of women, and ultimately its involvement in the Glorious Revolution.

NEHGS staff member, Ginevra Morse, sat down with Roger Thompson to discuss his latest contribution to the study of early Boston and its environs.

GM: How would you characterize early Charlestown as compared to other early Boston suburbs?

RT: Compared to other Middlesex towns, Charlestown was directly involved in Atlantic trade—fish, furs, and timber—from its earliest days. Many inhabitants had far broader horizons than in neighboring communities. Leading citizens were often partners or agents for influential merchants in London, Bristol, and other West Country ports, as well as for Caribbean, Mediterranean, and Atlantic Wine Island traders. With many men away at sea, and foreign seamen idling in its port, Charlestown had far more social and sexual problems to control.

GM: What was the most surprising thing you learned while doing your research?

RT: Discovering that the disreputable pauper Sarah Largin had made a new life for herself in Delaware after disappearing from the Charlestown records. Her son married into the gentry. I had many other surprises, like the saviour of early Plymouth, or a neighbor of East Anglia's notorious Witch-Finder General settling in Charlestown, but I'll leave those to readers to uncover.

GM: What was your biggest challenge in compiling From Deference to Defiance?

RT: I had several major challenges. At the start: I had to familiarize myself with hundreds of names of inhabitants as I trawled through thousands of town, county, colony, and imperial records. Later, I was frustrated that all that survived of pre-Revolutionary Charlestown was the street plan and the burying ground. Everything else had been destroyed in the Battle of Bunker Hill. I also had many new areas of English sources to research: the local records and histories of London suburbs, the port of Bristol, the counties of Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Dorset and Devon, and English Caribbean islands, especially Barbadoes. The whole project took over 7 years.

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Roger Thompson is emeritus professor of American Colonial History at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England. His earlier works include Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649–1699 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), Divided We Stand: Watertown 1630–80 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), and Cambridge Cameos: Stories of Life in Seventeenth-Century New England (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2005).

The Great Migration Study Project

2011-10-14T14:00:18Z

Between 1620 and 1640 about 20,000 men, women, and children crossed the Atlantic to settle New England. NEHGS' Great Migration Study Project, under the scholarly leadership of Robert Charles Anderson, FASG, aims to provide a concise, reliable genealogical and biographical account for each of these early immigrants.

With the recent completion of the second series, The Great Migration, Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635, we look back at how the Project began. Below is an excerpt from Anderson's article "Reflections on the Great Migration Study Project" which appeared in the 2008 holiday issue of New England Ancestors (now American Ancestors).

"During my early years in genealogy, while handling typical client commissions, I was constantly faced with the problem of learning what research had already been undertaken and published for a family of interest. This search frequently consumed much of the time allocated for research, and became very frustrating.

"Thus arose the concept of a reference work for New England genealogy which would update and supplant Savage* and some of the other single-colony-based compendia. The original idea was to produce a resource which would summarize all important research which had already [been] undertaken on families who had arrived in New England during the Great Migration, originally defined as the period from 1620 (arrival of the Mayflower) to 1643 (cessation of heavy migration due to the commencement of the English Civil War)."

Click here to read the entire article.

*Refers to James Savage's Genealogical Dictionary of New England, compiled during the Civil War and an important resource for New England research.

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Robert Charles Anderson, FASG is the director of the Great Migration Study Project. Anderson was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists in 1978 and has served as Secretary and President of that organization. He became a Contributing Editor of The American Genealogist in 1979, Associate Editor in 1985 and Coeditor in 1993. He has been an editorial consultant to the New England Historical and Genealogical Register since 1989.

New England Marriages Prior to 1700

2011-04-28T14:37:12Z

Genealogist and NEHGS staff member, David Dearborn, FASG, discusses the newly published three-volume set of Torrey's New England Marriages Prior to 1700 and why it's such an essential reference.

"The publication, in book form, of Clarence A. Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700, complete with the all-important source citations, makes this work available to the general public in a handy and easy-to-use format.

The result of decades of labor and research, “Torrey” (as the work is known) is a listing of nearly every known New England couple who were married by 1700—approximately 37,000 such couples in all. Following the information on each couple, Torrey provides page citations to the books or articles where he found the information. His methodology was simple: examine every relevant book in the NEHGS library for mention of any couple who fit his criteria. As a result, for those of us with seventeenth-century New England ancestors, New England Marriages Prior to 1700 is the main key to finding the hidden treasures in the library.

"Although it may seem contrary to logic, it is actually easier to sort out seventeenth-century New England ancestors than it is trace those who lived more recently. Prior to 1700, the total population of New England was, relatively speaking, rather small, and large-scale migration and general mixing of the population had not yet begun. Also, there is a greater likelihood that genealogists have already studied, untangled, and sorted out the earlier inhabitants. In numerous cases, the same pioneers and their immediate offspring have been written up and published by different researchers in the course of tracing their ancestral lines, and sometimes reached different conclusions. Torrey examined all of those works that were available during his lifetime (he died in 1962), and often included his opinion as to whether a particular source is reliable, dubious, or just plain wrong. It made sense for Torrey to stop in the year 1700 as pushing the date forward would have increased the project’s size exponentially.

"Over the course of my thirty-five years as a genealogist on the NEHGS staff, I have consulted Torrey innumerable times, not only to help library visitors, but for my own research as well. The publication, at long last, of Torrey in book form, is a momentous event in NEHGS’s history, and makes it possible for every genealogist to add it to his or her personal library."

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David Curtis Dearborn, FASG is a Genealogist who joined the NEHGS staff in 1976. Interested in genealogy since the age of eighteen, David has written numerous articles in scholarly journals and assisted with many published books including, New England Marriages Prior to 1700, three-volume set (2011).

The Best Genealogical Sources in Print

2011-03-04T16:45:55Z

Martin E. Hollick reviews the essential reference The Best Genealogical Sources in Print and discusses the expertise of author Gary Boyd Roberts.

"If the New York Times’s motto is 'all the news that’s fit to print,' then Gary Boyd Roberts’ ethos can be summarized as 'all the genealogical research in print that’s fit to be cited.' During his long career, culminating in being the Senior Research Fellow at the NEHGS, Roberts has been at the forefront of publicizing the best research in print to a broad audience through his lectures and his writings. This volume, The Best Genealogical Sources in Print, is a collection of those writings culled from book introductions and journal articles.

"Roberts really shines where his expertise intersects with his passion. This is best seen in the chapters dealing with immigrants of royal descent and the ancestry of notable Americans. Roberts has long been at the forefront of making sure that those researching their ancestry can find a well-researched line to royalty. His finely-detailed bibliography of sources for the ancestries of famous people are often a fount for anyone who may share an ancestor or two with such people.

"Other unique treasures include bibliographies on Middlesex County, Massachusetts testators of the early 17^th century, 100 colonial Rhode Island families, Connecticut families of Hartford, Milford, and Guilford, and English origins of immigrants from the Register 1984-2003. Roberts has long been the sole source on the best “all my ancestor” genealogies and his list of seventy such works in chapter 27 remains the premier list of such titles. Another useful chapter is on sources for the century of lost ancestors 1750-1850, and most genealogists will find new avenues of research for their brick walls that fall during that critical time period.

"Gary Boyd Roberts remains the premier bibliographer of genealogy in the United States. His work can transform the novice to a solid researcher and the solid researcher into an expert. This work is an excellent addition to all genealogical libraries and a work you find yourself consulting again and again."

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Martin E. Hollick is a professional genealogist and the author of the best seller, New Englanders in the 1600s: A Guide to Genealogical Research Published Between 1980 and 2005. His articles on genealogy have been published in several leading journals.

In Celebration of Presidents' Day

2011-02-16T14:39:02Z

In celebration of Presidents' Day, Penny Stratton, Managing Editor of Book Publications at NEHGS, sat down with author Gary Boyd Roberts to discuss the making of Ancestors of American Presidents.

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Gary Boyd Roberts joined the NEHGS staff in 1974 and held a number of positions including Director of Publications and Senior Research Scholar. Roberts is a former member of the Society of Genealogists and the Connecticut Society of Genealogists. Roberts's genealogical interests include immigrant origins and royal descents; royal and noble genealogy; the ancestry of notable figures, especially U.S. presidents; colonial New England, mid-Atlantic states, and the South. He is the author of a number of key resources including Royal Descents of 600 Immigrants to the American Colonies or the United States, Notable Kin Volume One and Volume Two, and The Best Genealogical Sources in Print.

A Guide to Massachusetts Cemeteries, Second Edition

2011-01-13T10:13:51Z

Author and NEHGS staff member, David Allen Lambert, discusses A Guide to Massachusetts Cemeteries and how this essential guidebook came about.

"While working at the Massachusetts State Archives over twenty years ago I began keeping track of the resources for local Boston cemeteries. Many genealogists wish to visit an ancestral cemetery, but don't know the location or if there is an office to visit. The locations of many small Massachusetts cemeteries on back roads were a mystery. This book includes the physical location, alias names, and date of incorporation or earliest gravestone within cemeteries across the state. Since many older gravestones are worn by the effects of time, nature, or simply vandalized, I have also included both published sources and manuscripts associated with each cemetery. This revised second edition includes many additions and corrections from the original, but I welcome any and all feedback to make this popular guidebook as complete as possible in future editions."

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David Allen Lambert has been a member of the NEHGS staff since 1993 and has provided invaluable guidance to researchers, members, and budding family historians as the "Online Genealogist." He maintains the daily blog, “Question of the Day” on AmericanAncestors.org, which highlights a sampling of the questions that David receives every day. Submit a Question