Is Meets Was

Amongst my collection of old photographs are pictures of my grandparents when they were in high school in Franklin, New Hampshire.  Fred and Mary played on the basketball teams for Franklin High School [Fred is the rightmost young man in the middle row, and Mary is the leftmost young woman in the front row.] Franklin High School, Class of 1902 [Fred is the rightmost person in the middle row.] Pup, officially known as Frederic Carroll Merrill, was born in Franklin on 10 December 1884, the fourth of eight children born to Gilbert Samuel Merrill, a Yankee who at the time, was a foreman at the Winnipesaukee Paper Mill, and his wife Maggie Carroll. Maggie was only 14 years old when she immigrated to Franklin in 1875. Some of Maggie’s aunts, uncles, and cousins had already arrived in Franklin. This included the Cunningham, Cushing, and Sullivan families of Franklin. Maggie's parents and siblings started arriving in Franklin years later, but not long after Fred's bi...

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...

It has been over a year since I created a blog post, and I am still suffering from writer's block. Rather than leaving this blog dormant any longer,   I am pursuing a wonderful alternative that presented itself at a family reunion this past summer. I was reunited with my cousin, Patsy, who has written a poignant series of stories about her childhood, living on Chauncey Street in Brooklyn, New York. I was enthralled by the incite that these stories provide into the lives of those who I knew so well and yet so little. I look forward to sharing with you  Remembering Chauncey Street by Patricia Jones [Pat Aronica] . On Tuesday, for the next 15 weeks, I will post on this blog, each of the anecdotes written by Patsy about her life on Chauncey Street from the middle 1940s through the 1950s. Photo of many of my cousins who gathered in Andover, NH for a family reunion in July 2013. Many others, who were unavailable when this picture was taken, w...

Merry Christmas. For me, Christmas is a nostalgic time as well as a joyous time. It is a time in which I remember the people who have touched my life. One such person is my paternal grandmother, Mary (Fitzgerald) Merrill. My life was touched by her absence. Mary holding Gil, Lib, and Dot, and Fred Merrill, 1913 Christmas Tree, 1913 In December 1913, my grandparents celebrated Christmas with a tree and a new camera. Fred and Mary were living in Franklin, New Hampshire with their three children: Dorothy Margaret (age 6), Elizabeth Mary (age 2), and Gilbert James Merrill (6 months). I wonder: "Were there presents under the tree for the children to open on Christmas morning? Did Santa stuff special treats in stockings hung by the chimney?" I do know that  there was plenty of snow to enjoy that winter.  Uncle Dan Fitzgerald c. 1913 Mary, Lib, Gil, and Dot, Winter 1913 Above is the only photograph I have of Uncle Dan. Two years later, at the age of 18,...

Bradley Lake in Andover, New Hampshire     2002 by Cathy H Paris Little Mary may have been the price the Fitzgeralds paid for coming to America.  By the fall of 1852, James, Betsey (Graney) Fitzgerald, and their 3 sons had joined James.  What happened to little Mary?  Was she with her sister, Joanna, on the other side of the pearly gates?   In June of 1853, James and Betsey welcomed a new Mary into the world, the first of five children to be born in Andover, New Hampshire.  Mary was followed by Lizzie (1854), Annie (1856), James E. (1857), and Nellie (1861).   Meanwhile, back in Ireland, the family of Henry Webster and Agnes (Low) was growing too.  Like James and Betsey, they had 10 children.  Their first four children were born in Scotland:  Jessie (1845), John (1847), Henry (1848), and James (1850).  I don’t know where their fifth child, Margaret (1852), was born.  Their last five children were all born in Ir...