Jun 21
Much of what I know about Jane Dummer, who was my 9th great-grandmother and one of the first settlers of Newbury, Massachusetts, comes from the writings of her son Samuel Sewall. He was a prolific diarist, Salem witch trial judge (oops), and early advocate of abolition and women’s rights. Read more
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
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
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
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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