Martha Mudge Wigglesworth, 1662–1690
Martha Mudge Wigglesworth was born in Malden, Massachusetts in 1662. Read more
Jun 3
2 Comments
What sort of uniform is this woman wearing?
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
Lucy Parsons 1 — Stuart Lindsley 0
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
Hidden from History hidden from library users
When I started this blog I was planning to read Sheila Rowbotham‘s Hidden from History, a feminist text which, it had been suggested to me, was perfect for a family history researcher interested in women.
I found the book in our city library’s online catalogue and logged a reservation for it. It usually takes no more than a week or two for a book to turn up at my branch, unless there’s a long queue of reservations. Weeks passed, and I began to wonder. More weeks passed, and I visited the branch in person to find out what was up. Read more
Eveline Allen, 1815–1899
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
Wedding day, 1945
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
More by Jill Lepore
I thought it might be worth looking up Jill Lepore, the Harvard professor who wrote the NYT op-ed piece I linked to here yesterday; and lo, I now have several more items on my reading list. Read more
Jane Franklin Mecom: “I Read as much as I Dare”
Erin, of the excellent Alice Martin Bishop blog, has started me off on a good, brain-awakening note on this sunny Edinburgh morning by posting a link to this NYT op-ed piece by Harvard professor Jill Lepore. It contrasts the fortunes of Benjamin Franklin with those of his sister Jane. Read more
Researching women in colonial America
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
Dorothy Q. Thomas – ‘Daughters of the American Revolution: Progressivism, Feminism and Human Rights in the U.S.’
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
