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You identify deceased people wherever you find them. One unusual story has appeared this week: a Civil War soldier depicted in a painting hanging in the Georgetown Neighborhood Library’s Peabody Room has now been identified as Sergeant Hiram Peck. Even better, traditional genealogy research has added much more information about Sergeant Peck's life.
You can read the interesting story in an article by Jerry A. McCoy in the GeorgetownPatch.com web site at http://goo.gl/KO3oW.
My thanks to Claire Bettag for telling me about this story.
This is a follow-up to my earlier "2012 Battle of the Alamo" article that is still available at http://goo.gl/A7piO:
The State Library and Archives Commission reversed itself Wednesday and agreed to loan the “Victory or Death” letter penned by Col. William Barret Travis to the Alamo next year. Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson requested that the letter return to the Alamo for the first time since Travis wrote it 177 years ago, where the General Land Office would place it on display for a two-week period coinciding with the historic battle there.
I am always fascinated by the historical items that appear online but this one really surprised me. YouTube now has a video from a man claiming that he was an eyewitness when John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865.
Samuel J. Seymour was five years old when his godmother, Mrs. George S. Goldsboro, took him to the theater to see “Our American Cousin.” They sat in the balcony opposite Lincoln’s box and had a great view of the President and Mrs. Lincoln. Seymour noted that he saw the President waving and smiling at people. Later, during the noise and commotion, Mr. Seymour did not realize Lincoln had been shot, only that he saw a man jump from the balcony.
In the 1920s and later, daredevil motorcycle riders worked at carnivals and circus side shows on the "wall of death." These were small, circular race tracks built with vertical walls. The riders started driving at the bottom and, as they accelerated, were able to go up the walls and drive round and round as fast as 80 miles an hour while perpendicular to the crowd that look in from atop the track.
You will notice the picture to the right features not only a motorcycle, but also an automobile with a lion in a sidecar, driven by a lady with no crash helmet. I suspect there was no seat belt for either the lady or the lion. You can click on the image to see a larger picture.
Between 1865 and 1869, thousands of Chinese migrants toiled at a grueling pace and in perilous working conditions to help construct America's First Transcontinental Railroad. At any given moment during construction, 10,000 to 15,000 Chinese workers were on the job. And yet remarkably, not a single document created by one of these workers – not even a letter – has ever been found.
Two Stanford scholars are leading a multi-year, transnational research endeavor that aims to finally give a voice to the Chinese laborers whose blasting techniques and sheer fortitude built the railway across the inhospitable mountains of the Sierra Nevada.
Many of us have encountered the word "ye" in old documents. Of course, we have all seen tourists shops labeled as "ye olde" something-or-other. How many of us know how to pronounce that?
For years, I assumed it was pronounced as it was written. I would pronounce it as "Yee Old." I was a bit surprised later to learn that I had been wrong.
What looks like a "y" is a written character deriving from the old English letter, "thorn," representing the "th" sound. No, it is not the letter "y," it is the letter thorn. The thorn was commonly used in written English in the Middle Ages and for some time after. That explains why we see it on old documents and even in modern written sentences that imitate historical writing. Other than these cases, the thorn has now almost disappeared.
Samuel Davis Agin, who served two tours of duty in the Civil War, was recognized on Saturday, Sept. 29, in the Princeton (New Jersey) Cemetery, after having been buried there for nearly a hundred years in an unmarked grave. His story was brought to light by two distant cousins who discovered their common ancestor, and each other, through online research.
One Texas agency mounting pressure on another to loan out one of the state’s most sacred texts for display at “the shrine of Texas independence.” The General Land Office is pressing the State Library and Archives Commission to loan the “Victory or Death” letter penned by Col. William Barret Travis, the commander of the Alamo garrison, from its “dark storage” for a 14-day exhibit at the Alamo in February. The State Library and Archives Commission has refused although the commission will meet again in Austin in three weeks to reconsider the matter.
Two hundred years after the Salem witch trials, farmers became convinced that their relatives were returning from the grave to feed on the living. In 1854, in Jewett City, Connecticut, townspeople exhumed several corpses suspected to be vampires that were rising from their graves to kill the living. A few newspaper accounts of these events survived.
In April, 1943, a German teenager watched a British Lancaster ED 427 bomber crash as it was shot down over Germany. The teenager visited the wreckage the following day. The British always listed the plane and its crew as "missing." Yet it wasn't missing at all. Instead, all the British had to do was to ask the right person, the eyewitness. He always knew the precise location but word of that location did not get back to British authorities until a few weeks ago. Now German researcher Uwe Benkel will lead an excavation to recover the Lancaster and, it’s hoped, the plane’s seven-member crew Saturday morning from a field outside Laumersheim, 10 miles west of Mannheim. If successful, the dig will put to rest a decades-old mystery.
The Missouri Department Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War has released a great new resource for anyone researching Civil War Union veterans. You can find a lot of genealogical information included in almost every soldier's file. The following announcement was written by the Missouri Department Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, 1861-1865:
The Missouri Department Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, 1861-1865 (DUVCW) is pleased to announce that the digitization and indexing of Volume 1 of the Missouri Veterans Home (St. James) Inmate Register is complete and ready for viewing on the Missouri State Archives website.
It is the beginning of the football season in North America. Never mind that the rest of the world has their own version of football that we call soccer. The North American version has been around for years, although with some major differences.
It is amazing how hard great-grandmother worked at being beautiful. When Barkham Burroughs wrote his Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information in 1889, he devoted a full chapter to the “secrets of beauty.” Here are some excerpts:
Bathe often: At least once a week, but if possible, a lady should “take a plunge or sponge bath three times a week.”
Don’t wash your hair: Water is “injurious” to the hair. Instead, wipe “the dust of the previous day” away on a towel. You can also brush your hair during any long, idle breaks in the day. 30 minutes is a good hair-brushing session.
Blacks fought in the Civil War, surprisingly on the side of the Confederacy, many of them from Texas, Palestine historian Norris White Jr. said his research shows. They are the "black forgotten Confederates," White said, who has extensively researched the role of blacks in the Confederate Army for a book he is writing that will be titled Black Texans Who Served in the Confederate Army.
On the night of November 8, 1800, fire devastated the War Office, consuming the papers, records, and books stored there. Two weeks later, Secretary of War Samuel Dexter lamented in a letter that “All the papers in my office [have] been destroyed.” For the past two centuries, the official records of the War Department effectively began with Dexter’s letter. Papers of the War Department 1784-1800, an innovative digital editorial project, will change that by making some 55,000 documents of the early War Department many long thought irretrievable but now reconstructed through a painstaking, multi-year research effort available online to scholars, students, and the general public.
Writing in the JewishGen Blog, Jan Meisels Allen describes a new online resource that will interest genealogists, historians, and many others. The New York City Department of Records has posted 870,000 photographs on-line. Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the photographs feature all manner of city oversight.
We are now in the midst of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. Many books have been written about this war and I suspect that tens of thousands of documents created during that war have been researched at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. However, how many people have ever looked at the documents created by the British?
They DID participate in this war, you know! And their record keeping is excellent.
Archaeologists will dig up a council car park in a bid to find the remains of King Richard III.
The king, the last Plantagenet, ruled England from 1483 until he was defeated and killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. It is believed his body was brought to Leicester - but the exact whereabouts of the church have become lost over time. Old maps were used to work out that the Franciscan Friary, demolished in 1538, would have been where the car park now stands.
If human remains are found, DNA will be used to hopefully prove or disprove that the body is that of Richard III. Canadian furniture maker Michael Ibsen, 55, is the nephew on the 17th generation of the monarch. His late mother Joy, who died four years ago aged 85, was the niece in the 16th generation of Anne of York - the sister of Richard III. The assumption is that Mr. Ibsen would carry mitochondrial DNA matching that of Richard III.
Earlier this week, the Shaw Memorial on Beacon Street in Boston was splashed with a bucket of yellow paint. The monument depicts Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the men of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry marching to battle. The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was made up of "colored" Civil War soldiers. The memorial, Augustus Saint-Gaudens's most popular work, has been closely identified with the Academy-Award-winning movie Glory, starring Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, and Denzel Washington.
Monuments of all sorts get defaced and many monuments honoring Black Americans were also been destroyed or defaced back in the days of the civil rights movement. What makes this story different is the perpetrator of the crime: Rosemine Occean, an African-American woman from nearby Quincy, Massachusetts.
Records are wherever you find them. In 1480, good quality paper was scarce and anything that was available was re-used. The London College of Arms, headquarters of British heraldry, recently discovered papers from a book of debtors and creditors for Florentine merchant-banking company, Domenicio Villani & Partners. The banking records, only half-covered by the design, date from 1422-24 and hint at the extensive trade in wool and other commodities produced in Britain during the era. The paper was "re-used" about 1480 to record coats of arms.
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