May 20
Just a quick post, as I’m feeling blogging withdrawal on account of MASSIVE quantity of copy-editing needing done, deadline looming, and exciting visit from my dad coming up this weekend. I am working on a proper post, but for now, I genuinely do want to work out who this woman is (she’s not related to me). I’d really appreciate any ideas about her uniform. Read more
It would, of course, be exciting to discover a woman in my family tree with a traceable record of something newsworthy and positive; political campaigning or activism, for instance. I don’t need an “extraordinary” hook in order to find someone’s life interesting – if anything, the opposite is true – but just once, it would be nice to find a woman who generated press coverage without having to be murdered, or embroiled in a custody battle with a toddler-kidnapping ex-husband. Read more
I discovered A Narrative History of Remsen, New York, 1789–1898 while researching my 3 x great-grandmother, Eveline Allen. As the title suggests, it’s a local history book, self-published in 1914 by one Millard Fillmore Roberts; only 250 copies were printed at the time, but as with many such volumes, it’s been rescued from obscurity in the digital age and granted a new life online. Read more
OK, I know … but it had to be done, right? Royal Wedding coverage is hard to avoid today, and has inspired me to dig out these images of my grandparents’ wedding and scan them at last. Quality isn’t amazing – they are scans of photocopies of originals – but they’re sweet nonetheless. Read more
Over the past few days I’ve been working on some female ancestors from early American settler families. This has led me from town record indexes on to published genealogies of the type popular with amateur historians around the turn of the twentieth century – for instance, this one on the Brewer family (a bit unusual in that it was compiled by a woman), or this huge one about the Baldwins. Read more
I stumbled across the publicity for this talk at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute about a month ago (around the time I last posted here, actually). It has now been uploaded as a video, and you can see it here. Read more
Earlier this week, on the eve of International Women’s Day, I read an article on so-called “mill girls” in the current issue of the BBC Who Do You Think You Are? magazine. It mentioned the suffragette Annie Kenney (1879–1953), who spent 15 years as a Manchester mill worker before becoming a prominent figure in the WSPU. Read more
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