Because many genealogical records from the island of St. Kitts have not been digitized and put online, I have often turned to civil registry records on microfilm. While looking through page after page of Kittitian death records from the mid 1800s, I suddenly noticed that over the space of…
Author: <span>dreamer</span>
As the northeast United States experiences record cold temperatures this winter, I have been reading about how the brutally freezing European winter of 1709 led to the immigration of a number of my ancestors from the southwest area of Germany known as the Palatine region. The surnames of Palatine Germans…
Known for beautiful scenery and stately mansions, the Hudson River was once home to some pretty radical thoughts and actions. Among my paternal ancestors in this area was a family of 18th century Dutch settlers called Dederick. Jury William Dederick lived in Saugerties, NY, and was active in local…
One of the US’s fears during the War of 1812 was that the British would invade the Great Lakes region and move down through Ohio to the Mississippi River, thus gaining easy access to much of the mid-west. After Fort Detroit fell to the British, General (later President) William Henry…
In today’s atmosphere of polarization in U.S. politics, it’s hard to imagine Democrats and Republicans on the same side of an issue as controversial as war. While reading period newspaper articles on members of my family tree, I recently came across an article about a NY state resident from the…
While researching some of my husband’s Kittitian ancestors who settled in Harlem in the early 1900s, I have been coming across lots of information about immigrants from the West Indies, and their influence on the Harlem Renaissance period of the 1920s. Escaping the decline of the sugar industry and…
I just learned that there was a custom in the US of dressing up in costumes on Thanksgiving. This practice seems to have been popular in some areas of the country from the 19th century until the early 1950s. This solves a…
Researching my husband’s maternal grandfather’s British tree was a daunting task. Due in part to his non-combat death during World War II, I had almost no information to go on – just his name and two or three random facts. One of these random facts eventually opened up a…
I’m having trouble finding much information about my great grandmother Catherine. She died young in 1913, at age 42, and there isn’t a long life’s worth of documentation on her. Catherine Agnes was born in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1861, of Irish parents. Her surname shows up sometimes as McElmeel, McElmee,…
My husband’s paternal family tree comes from St. Kitts, a beautiful island in the Caribbean that was a British territory until its independence in 1983. His Kittitian ancestors are an interesting blend of British, French, African, and Madeiran lines. The Madeirans came to St. Kitts and Nevis in the mid-1800s,…