Daily Genealogist

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.

In honor of Valentine’s Day tomorrow, we present links to several valentine collections held by historical societies.

The Wisconsin Historical Society presents a Valentine’s Day card gallery featuring 99 valentines from 1840 to 1980. An accompanying brief history of Valentine’s Day greeting cards highlights the role of Worcester, Massachusetts, native Esther Howland in popularizing the exchange of valentines.

WBUR, Boston’s public radio station, told the story of Esther Howland for a Valentine’s Day segment last year. You can listen to an audio clip and view a slideshow of valentines created by Esther Howland that are now part of the collections of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester.

The American Antiquarian Society also features an online exhibit, Making Valentines: A Tradition in America, which includes five sections: origins, early valentines, Esther Howland, George Whitney, and Victorian valentines.

The Maine Historical Society’s Maine Memory Network showcases valentines from its collections in an online slideshow.

A brief podcast from the Minnesota Historical Society entitled “Believe Me True: Victorian Valentines, 1840–1890," highlights valentines from the Society’s collections. An article about valentines in the Minnesota Historical Society collections, published in Minnesota History in 1981, is available online. 

Last week we featured an article by Jason Newton, an NEHGS member, on his Old Connecticut Path project. Jason reported great interest in the topic from Weekly Genealogist readers. In the past week, his Old Connecticut Path website was visited by over 4,000 first time visitors and the project’s YouTube videos were viewed by visitors from 47 U.S. states and the District of Columbia!

Here are excerpts from just a few of the many comments sent to Jason Newton:

Jan Welch of Clifton, Virginia:
Just yesterday my husband and I drove from Westborough, Mass., through Hartford on our way to Virginia, where we live, and as we were driving I wondered if anyone had been or was able to trace the path. My family connections are many, and include Stephen Hart, Anthony Howkins, John Lee, Nathaniel Foote, William Buell, Josiah Churchill, and dozens of others. Thank you for tracing the path. Now I will make it a priority to follow as much of the path as much as possible from the material you have provided. Perhaps next summer.

Martin Marix Evans of Towcester, Northamptonshire, England:
I was very interested to see your announcement in the NEHGS enewsletter, as I live five miles from Towcester where Thomas Hooker met up with Samuel Stone, then a resident of the town, before setting off for Boston in 1633. I admire your enterprise in rediscovering the Old Connecticut Path. People are very interested in buildings but, here in the UK, find it harder to engage with landscapes. The tracing of ancient pathways reveals so much in history.

Donna Brock of Wayland, Mass.:
I saw the information about your Old Connecticut Path project on the NEHGS Weekly Genealogist newsletter and felt compelled to write. I live on the Old Connecticut Path in Wayland, Massachusetts. At the end of our street, on a small island right before the road intersects with Boston Post Road, is a rock with a plaque to mark the significance of the road and Rev. Hooker. [Readers might find a 2010 New York Times article on the Boston Post Road (between Boston and New York) to be of interest. — LB]

Ric Skinner, GISP, of Sturbridge, Mass.:
Your research into the Old Connecticut Path is fascinating! I completed a project in 2009 with a small grant from The Last Green Valley to map the route of the Indian Bay Path through Sturbridge. The report is available online. My primary source document was Levi Badger Chase’s field map, used when he walked the route across Massachusetts, and his book, The Bay Path and Along the Way.

David W. Chester of Sherborn, Mass.: I had always wondered about the Old Connecticut Path but then dismissed it as undoubtedly long lost to interstates, state highways, malls, developments, and suburban blight. Now you have rekindled my interest in the path, the famous trek, and perhaps, as you suggest, catching a glimpse into our distant past. The Rev. Thomas Hooker was the brother of my ancestor, Dorothy (Hooker) Chester. 

A lavish and substantial volume, The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, edited by Joseph Crowley, William J. Smyth, and Mike Murphy was published in Ireland in August 2012 by Cork University Press; it was published later in the year in the United States by New York University. The work was the winner of the Best Irish Published Book of the year for 2012. For those interested in Irish history, and especially those interested in knowing more about what pushed their ancestors to emigrate, this is a book well worth reading and becoming immersed in.

The December 9, 2012, Boston Sunday Globe offered a summary: “For decades following the famine, little was said or written about it. Today it is the subject of a monumental study. Atlas of the Great Irish Famine . . . is aimed at general readers as well as academics. It analyzes the famine on a parish-by-parish basis, contemplating the details of daily life, and it situates the Famine in the context of others throughout the world. It includes essays by more than fifty scholars — examining, among other subjects, relief measures and land reform — as well as maps, period illustrations, and archival documents."

During the Great Famine, between 1845 and 1852, over a million Irish people died and nearly one and a half million fled the country, most to North America. The facts and poignant details behind those impossibly hard-to-grasp numbers are all in the atlas. An Amazon.com user gave his review of the book the title, “An Atlas Made Me Cry,” and I think that comment probably provides the best short summary of how powerful this volume is.

The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine has its own website. The book is available for patrons to use at the NEHGS Library, and it is currently offered for purchase on Amazon.com for $66.45.