History
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Saturday, June 5th, 2010Memorial Day has just come and gone. I took my kids for a bike ride to the nearby cemetery. There, four of their great-grandparents, one great-great-grandparent and several of their great aunts and uncles lie buried. The main family plot is easy enough for me to find but one of my uncles is buried elsewhere [...]
Family Stories, Ethnic Traditions and Easter Witches
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010This last Thursday, my children did what they always do on Maundy Thursday (the Thursday before Easter). They put on old skirts and aprons. They each put their hair up in a kerchief. They each got a basket, a toy cat and a broom. With a little makeup they became “Easter Witches.” Then they did [...]
That Flash of Recognition
Monday, March 29th, 2010I suppose everyone has had the experience of learning something new and suddenly that little fact seems to pop up everywhere. That experience has just happened to me again, so I’ve been inspired to write about it. A few posts back I wrote about This Republic of Suffering, about death and dying in mid-nineteenth century [...]
This Republic of Suffering
Sunday, March 14th, 2010As family historians we are always trying to gather facts and tie them together into lives. Though every event we can document is important, there are three that get most of the attention, birth, marriage and death. All three are surrounded by practices and rituals unique to their time and culture. Birth and death bracket [...]
Anachrotopia
Saturday, February 20th, 2010What makes a place a place? While writing A Very Porous Border I couldn’t help but think about what we mean by the concept of a place and, after that post, the natural example for me to use comes from the two largest countries in North America. Today we take the existence of Canada and [...]
A Very Porous Border
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010Watching the Vancouver Olympics, it seems quite natural to both cheer and be excited both for your country and for whoever turns in a great performance. Sometimes we confine ourselves to our national borders, other times an amazing achievement transcends any man-made boundaries. Searching for the history of our families can also be a time [...]
Daughter’s of the Union
Sunday, January 24th, 2010I think that one of the most important “techniques” in genealogy is the study of history. Often that means studying both time’s nooks and crannies and its large semi-explored regions. After all, our ancestors may have been swept along in vast historical currents but they were also specific people, with specific backgrounds, living in specific [...]
Veterans Day
Monday, November 16th, 2009I wonder how many people remember why we have Veterans Day when we do. After years of war, on “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” the guns fell silent on the Western Front and for all practical purposes, World War I—The Great War, the War to End All Wars—came to [...]
Living History
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009I am always trying to get into the heads of the people that I’m researching and one of the best ways of doing that is through living history. Go out and visit a place that resembles somewhere that an ancestor lived or, if you are truly lucky, you might even find that there is some [...]
Memphis, 1878
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009I just finished reading one of those books that can open the eyes to a bit of history that is not so well known. The title of the book, The American Plague, refers to the disease yellow fever. Like many diseases that no longer torment us, we don’t realize the justifiable horror that our ancestors [...]
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