Is Meets Was

Mary Elizabeth Merrill, (1886-1918) Commonly called the Spanish Flu, although it is now widely believed to have originated in the state of Kansas, the last pandemic had an irrevocable impact on our family. On Thursday, 3 October 1918, our grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Merrill of 413 Lincoln Avenue in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, died from the Spanish Flu. Her death certificate attributes her cause of death to La Grippe. She had been sick for two weeks. During her last four days, she suffered from pneumonia. The family legend is that she was pregnant with her fifth child. Mary was only thirty-two years old. Dot (Dorothy), Gil (Gilbert),  Lib (Elizabeth Mary), and Fred  (Frederic) Merrill, c. 1917 The whole family was stricken by the virus, and a nurse was brought to their home to care for the family. Mary’s four children recovered without any lasting physical effects. My dad, Gil, was five years old at the time. Dad told me that his earliest memory ...

After months of struggling to publish an eBook version of  Pioneers of Vanderveer Park, I am happy to report that you can now  download  the book to your Kindle or the Kindle app on your iPad or mobile phone. For those of you who have already acquired the printed book or the PDF version, I have greatly appreciated your personal feedback, and I hope you will translate that into a positive online review. As most of you may already know, I have written this and my other books as non-profit ventures. The price charged at Kindle is the minimum price which Kindle would allow me to set. My reward is your reading and enjoying the book. Why did it take months of struggling to turn  Pioneers of Vanderveer Park into an eBook? Like many first time efforts, the biggest part of getting it done was learning how to do it. Now when I create books, the process of turning them into eBooks will be relatively easy. © 2019, Cathy H Paris

Free download or a printed copy is available now at Lulu.com. The Epub version is coming soon to Amazon. com— Pioneers of Vanderveer Park . This is the true story of two people, Conrad and Augusta, who began their lives in Germany when the Civil War was raging in America and Otto von Bismarck was leading Prussia into wars with Denmark, France, and Austria. Conrad and Augusta lived the immigrant's dream of finding opportunity in a foreign land and culture—pioneers. Conrad and Augusta were among the leaders in the transformation of the farmlands in the middle of Brooklyn, New York into neighborhoods filled with homes. This development, whose name and whereabouts were familiar to all who once lived in Brooklyn, is now all but forgotten—Vanderveer Park. Vanderveer Park and its sister development, Bay View Heights, included most of the area between Cortelyou Road and Kings Highway and between Flatbush Avenue and Troy Avenue. Conrad was the builder of the Cortelyou Club ...

  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