Last week I finished blogging about the Civil War but Easter occurred last week and I gave a talk about calendars. Here are a few thoughts that lead to why Easter matters so much to our calendar and why you may not really know when an ancestor was born. We live with three basic celestial […]
The First Sunday After… What? Read More »
This is the last of a three part look at the Civil War 150 years after it began. The first part was The Census Goes to War the second part can be found at Seven Score and Ten. The aftermath of the war brought a wealth of genealogical information in the form of pension applications.
Reconstructing the Post-War World Read More »
(This is the second part of a three part series. You can find the first part at The Census Goes to War.) I admit that I am fascinated by the Civil War. The scale was so far beyond anything America had known before. In the two days of the Battle of Shiloh, more Americans fell
Seven Score and Ten Read More »
As the anniversary of the start of the American Civil War draws near, I thought I might write a post or two about the traces that war left in our documents. Why exactly the war was fought is, like many historical questions, more complex than people generally assume. Yet it is hard to escape the
The Census Goes to War Read More »
I just gave a talk about understanding and using maps. Most of my examples were from maps of North America but some were from countries that contributed immigrants to this side of the Atlantic. That is, they were maps of “the old country.” It is an interesting phrase because it sounds like a nickname for
I often think about what people of the future might “discover” about me or people that I know well. I think it is an interesting thought experiment. If I imagine what my paper trail will look like in a century or two, I can imagine what mistakes a future family historian might make and perhaps
Who Will They Think We Were? Read More »
Another St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone. My kids are quite aware of being Swedish. They were born in Sweden after all. They’ve also been told more than once that their ancestry is more German than anything else. This time of year though, I get to remind them that they are part Irish as
The Luck of the Irish Read More »
One of those bits of reverse culture-shock that I have experienced since returning to the U.S. after twenty years abroad has to do with measurement. After years of only needing to think about the metric system’s factors of ten, it was time to try to remember all the factors of 3, 4, 6, 12, 16
A Measure of Confusion Read More »
I’ve been preparing a new talk about maps and one of the things I will discuss is using Sanborn Maps. I have the images for my father’s home town from a few years before he was born. I also have the census that was taken a few months after he came into the world. Censuses
Taking Walks with the Census Taker and my Dad Read More »
Getting back across the Atlantic is always a challenge. Immigrants’ names changed under the influence of English phonetics and naming patterns. Some intentionally picked names easier for their new neighbors to pronounce, names less foreign and more easily accepted. It was a long voyage and the great separation made it seem unimportant to record, with
Crisscrossing the Atlantic Read More »