This month is the 250th birthday of John Quincy Adams, as Danielle Cournoyer reminds us on the Vita Brevis blog. This reminds me of my own little JQA story, from a few years ago, a timely illustration of some of the “gotchas” you can face when using transcriptions. I was researching a line in my [...]
Decoration Day, the original name for Memorial Day, started in 1868, to remember those who fell in the Civil War, and to decorate their graves. Although I have many relatives and ancestors who proudly served in the armed forces, from the earliest colonial wars to Afghanistan and Iraq, as far as I can tell, I [...]
If you flip through the pages of an old town book in Vermont, you might find, tucked away between tax records and town meeting minutes, something like this example from Putney, in Windham County, with a few pages of identical entries, each with the statement, “I do not agree in Religious Opinion with a Majority [...]
