James Fitzgerald, the Fortuitous?
Family Reunion at the old family farm in Andover, NH, July 13, 2013 Who knew we were canoeing on top of our families' great investment of 1866? Not me, at least not until last week. Also last week, my perception of my great-great-grandfather, James Fitzgerald, was radically changed by just a little bit of new information. In 2002, 2003, and 2007, I visited the offices where the property records for Merrimack County are housed in Concord, New Hampshire. During these visits, I went through all the Grantee Books and Grantor Books, looking for property records pertaining to my great-grandfather, James E. Fitzgerald, and to his father, James Fitzgerald. I had copies made of the forty-three property records which I thought were relevant to their stories. These included mostly deeds and mortgages. As you can imagine, this was a fairly large stack of paper with lots of legalese. In 2007, I spent painstaking hours extracting pertinent information from all this paperwork...