Is Meets Was

  When religious and political differences in England tore the country apart with anger and hate, twenty thousand people left England and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to America. One of the people was my 7th Great Grandfather, Aquila Chase. Aquila was born about 1618 in England. Aquila may have been born about thirty-five miles from London in the town of Chesham. Today you could drive from Chesham to London in about an hour.  There were no cars when Aquila was alive. If Aquila went to London, he walked, rode a horse, or maybe took a carriage. The trip took a whole day. I don’t know if Aquila ever went to London, but I do know that Aquila and his brother, Thomas, sailed to America, arriving by 1640. When Aquila and Thomas arrived, my 10th Great Grandfather, Rev. Stephen Bachiler, was already in America.  The Rev. Bachiler was a tall, thin man with white hair, very dark eyes, and a prominent nose. He was obstinate and had firm beliefs. Although he moved and...

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...

Pup on the steps of 2047 East 54th St., Brooklyn Have you found any letters written by your parents or grandparents or even by your more distant ancestors? My forebears either were not letter-writers or their letters have been lost or destroyed. Amongst my family artifacts, I have only one letter, a letter written by my grandfather to his mother in 1937. I forgot  that I had this letter. It was sent to me by a cousin several years ago, at a time when I was busy caring for my mother or otherwise focused on enjoying our newly arrived grandchildren. The note from my cousin, with the letter, got put into a stack to deal with later. And later finally came. Today, I rediscovered the letter For his several hundred descendants, here it is: © 2015, Cathy H Paris

 Erasmus Hall High School's Class of June 1931, Brooklyn, NY   As I approach 70, I feel compelled to accelerate the process of digitizing family photos and home movies. To this end, yesterday, I dropped at Costco several reels of 8mm film, quite a few video cassettes, and almost 200 slides for digitization. This afternoon, I opened a box with rolls of oversized photographs. I checked the pricing online and discovered it would cost me $15-$60 per photograph to have them scanned by a service. Then I remembered my Flip Pal Scanner. Using the Flip Pal, I scanned roughly a dozen 3"x 5" inch overlapping sections of the largest photograph. The original photograph is about 7.5" x 40". I stitched the dozen scans together using the software provided with the scanner. The result is shown above. I only wish that the Flip Pal scanned at a higher resolution than 600 dpi. However, I decided to proceed with scanning the rest of my photos at 600 dpi....

Donna (front, center); Cathy, Leila, Pat Aronica, Mary Heilig, family friend, Richie (middle row); Gil (back, center). c. 1948 at Uncle Fred and Aunt Betty's place in Bergen Beach, NY. I can’t remember the year, or exactly how old I was.  Mary (Hanna) Heilig and I had convinced Aunt Dot to let us look inside the trunk which contained our grandmother’s belongings. Trunk shown in the Spring edition of Sear's 1906 catalog. [Our grandmother, Mary Elizabeth [Fitzgerald] Merrill  died from the Spanish flu when our parents were still young children. Her husband survived another forty-seven years, forty-seven years in which he never ceased to mourn his loss.] I can tell you that we were sworn to secrecy. We were never ever to tell “Pup” that Aunt Dot let us look inside the trunk.  The look of sheer terror on Aunt Dot’s face was enough to let us know not to breathe a word to anyone. Dorothy aka Aunt Dot (top), Mary [aka Lib & Pat's mother-to-be], ...

When I first became hooked on genealogy, I quickly focused on my mother’s side of the family.   Mom's grandparents  must have been an integral part of the first couple of years of my life. My brother and I about 1947 on East 35th St. near Flatbush Ave. I remember walking from our apartment on Flatbush Avenue to their home on Albany Avenue in Brooklyn, N.Y. It was a perfect summer day, and I was feeling very happy. I was walking with my mother and brother. I remember I was wearing one of my prettier dresses and my perfect, white, Buster Brown shoes. We were passing a neighborhood park with a wrought iron fence. I forgot to watch my steps, and I smelled my mistake. I had stepped in dog poop, and my little white shoes were no longer perfect. I looked up at Mom, and I could tell she was very annoyed. I began to cry. This was not my first misadventure with dog poop. I had been repeatedly cautioned to watch my steps, but I continued to get lost in the world around me ...