Initially my motives were less than noble—I wanted money for school. Because my family’s oral history claimed that we descended from Cherokee Indians, I thought that if I documented my family’s roots, I might be able tap into scholarship funds for Native American descendants.In December 1999, I started my quest.
Back in the 1940s, my husband had an imposing aunt, Agatha, a compulsive talker who, if she’d rated herself in modern terms from one to ten, would have boasted an eleven. Aunt Agatha was, by her most charitable relatives, dubbed a “character.” Aunt Agatha always prefaced her remarks with a loud open-mouthed intake of air.
Wikis, Blogs, RSS, and Widgets. Characters in a children’s book? Not so. These strange words describe new ways that the Internet is being used by people to exchange information.
While most of us think of divorces as modern-day inventions, actually they have been around a long time in America. As early as 1639 in Massachusetts Bay Colony, James Luxford’s wife asked for a divorce because James already had another wife. A magistrate granted the divorce, took the now-former Mrs.
Christmas is often a profoundly emotional and sentimental time for families and friends to celebrate with each other, and with gifts, food, and special decorations for their homes and offices.
On 28 July 1856, sixteen-year-old Peter Conover Hains wrote to the Governor of New Jersey and others seeking en-dorsements and influence for his application to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point: “I, who thus address myself to you, am yet a boy. A boy just entering upon the waves of for-tune. It has been the lot of me to be of humble origin. . .
Stories. Artifacts. Memories. For a genealogist, these can be the greatest gifts ever—to give and receive. Take the box of letters my Uncle Edwin wrote from a World War I battlefield “somewhere in France.” They were packed with my mom’s treasured belongings when she moved to Mexico as a bride, and again when she moved to Texas forty years later.
John Dillon was stuck.
Conventional wisdom says start your family history quest with what you know and then ask members of your family-—parents, grandparents, and others—what they know. But John didn’t even know his grandfather’s name when his parents died, and his early attempts to find information about the family failed.
A pair of shots—the assassination of a world leader and his wife. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back and started the Great War.It took more than four years and dozens of countries to finish World War I. And, in the course of 1,500 days, nearly 9 million of our relatives lost their lives on the battlefields. Indirectly, we lost countless more.
Sacagawea was only fourteen when she led Lewis and Clark across the country. Phillis Wheatley’s first poem was published when she was twelve. Nine-year-old Johnny Clem ran away from home during the Civil War to become a soldier and became the drummer boy known as Johnny Shiloh.