My grandmother lived in the same apartment building in Brooklyn for over fifty years. She had moved there just before the bar mitzvah of my father, her eldest child, and remained there until her death, raising three children in, and burying my grandfather from, the same two-bedroom apartment. When I was growing up, my feelings about my grandmother were the same, I imagine, as many other children.
Swept under the carpet for many years, a British child emigration scheme was in operation between 1869 and 1939. More than 100,000 children, most between seven and fourteen years of age, but some as young as four, were sent to Canada from the British Isles by at least fifty childcare organizations.
In late 2000, I did some work for a computer distributor headquartered in Kansas with regional sales offices in Atlanta, L.A., Chicago, Connecticut, and Dallas. In early 2001, the distributor decided to connect its offices with a voice over Internet protocol network, or VoIP for short. It sounded cool, until you tried to watch a video conference or talk on a phone.
While energetic youth rarely look forward to the beginning of school in the late summer, genealogists should still take note: due to the types of records and publications schools generate and the importance of schools in communities, school records are a valuable resource. Among the more commonly used school records are attendance rolls and grade registers.
We often reckon the passage of time by generations, but just how long is a generation?As a matter of common knowledge, we know that a generation averages about 25 years—from the birth of a parent to the birth of a child—although it varies case by case.
Every week, hundreds of people discover a new pastime—collecting ancestors. And the computer may be the main reason for this phenomenal growth. The computer is almost as common in homes today as a television or a telephone. Improvements are constantly being made to popular genealogy software programs making them easier to use and making electronic storage capabilities much more efficient.
Mark Twain was speaking once about his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, to a reporter in India. “All that goes to make the me in me,” Twain said, “is a small Missouri village on the other side of the globe.”
I have never met a family historian who didn’t feel the same. Home is a place we never forget.
Someday you might run across an old photograph of someone who seems to be posed in an odd and unnatural way, or perhaps the person appears to be sleeping. It’s just possible that you will have stumbled upon a fairly rare—from a collector’s standpoint—form of photography known as postmortem photography.
Topographical maps, aerial maps, atlases, county road maps, plat maps, ordnance survey maps, census enumeration district maps, Sanborn fire insurance maps— there are hundreds of different kinds of maps, each with its own purpose.
When Brenton was growing up in New England , he learned from his uncle that they were both closely related to some legendary characters from the “Wild West”—the Dalton Gang of Coffeyville, Kansas-raid fame.