- Read the tale of the Angel Gabriel.
- Funky, Little Tidbit:Not a single ancestor in nearly 400 years of immigration has come through Ellis Island.
Hard to believe, but true!
Most ancestors arrived long before Ellis Island opened and those who arrived late in the 1800s came into Boston, not New York.
- All the sources I've used, by family, are on their own pages by Family Name or
Alphabetical by source. You can also download this .pdf format of the resources by Family Name.
Those of you writing your own HTML, please feel free to rip my code on the
Sources (or any other pages!)for your own use. I know what a pain it is to code endnotes, so I'd rather share.
- What are those Generation Numbers and Person Numbers on your pages?
- What's up with those funky dates? (21d:4m:1660, 4 February 1739/40, etc.)
Blame it on the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in the American Colonies in 1752.
The Connecticut State Library System
has a nice page explaining this change.
There's a TERRIFIC site on
Ancestor Search especially for genealogists.
It has a chart for when each country changed from one calendar to the other.
And, just for fun, Tarek has a nifty calendar convertor
between the Julian, Gregorian and Hijiri calendars.
BE CAREFUL WITH COLONIAL DATES!!!!! 21d:4m:1660 does NOT mean "April 21, 1660"!!! The colonial new year
began on March 25th, not January 1st (using Spring as the start of the new year...using January 1st as the start of the new year was
mandated by the Church when it laid out the Gregorian Calendar. Thus began "April Fools" - those who still celebrated the
beginning of the new year in late March instead of the officially sanctioned January 1st.)
I've tried to keep the old style dates exactly as I have found them (much to the consternation of my genealogy software!) instead
of trying to "modernize" them. I prefer it, since it reunites us with those little day to day touches of colonial life.
What's a "Register Report"? The New England Historic Genealogical Society
is the oldest one of it's kind in the USA, second only to the Mormons in the amount of information (from all over the world)
which resides in its august building at 101 Newbury Street in Boston, MA. They are a wonderful resource of all things genealogical --
no matter where you live or where your ancestors came from. And they are the reason you have these pages before you. Join it if you can,
and if you come to Boston, buy the day pass to visit it and research there.
Their template for "how to present your family" is one of the earliest codified in this country. It is easy and intuitive to read
and use. I've modified the "official" version a bit to more closely resemble the reports in
Anderson's The Great Migration series. I found it to be more comprehensive and even easier to read.
By the way, it is called the "Register Report" after this organization's Quarterly, The New England
Historic Genealogical Register.