Tag: Mary Smith Phelps
A journey from 1891-Post 4
Signature number four A fly on the wall My mom has two, gold trunks in her apartment, and both are filled with genealogical treasures. In late August, she found something in the bottom of the smaller trunk. It was an autograph book once belonging to my great, great, great grandparents Charles and Maria Smith. To ...
The Art of Successful Letter Writing
A Letter from an Ancestor By Susan Phelps “In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people’s lives.” ~ Anatole Broyard On May 9, 1887, the Reverend Charles Smith sat down in his home in Plover, Wisconsin, to write a ...
Family history: Storytelling with a theme or topic
Choosing a subject or topic to tell a story Day-to-day aspects of life 100 years ago or more When trying to capture what life was like 100+ years ago, it is difficult to know a person's personality or character from a photo. While photos may not reveal an ancestor's personality, we can come away with ...
Family history: Understanding relationships
Telling a story through family relationships One example: When cousins marry cousins Not allowed in every state these days, in our not-so-distant-past it wasn't uncommon for a cousin to marry a cousin. A look at populations and geography and one can better understand the reasons. How does this effect our understanding of family when, through research, ...
Meeting an ancestor through a biographical sketch
Ways to learn about our ancestors Creating a biography In the following article, Susan creates a biographical sketch of Mary Smith Phelps, her husband's grandmother. Mary was someone that neither Susan nor her husband ever met. Incidentally, Mary was sister to my great, great grandfather Alfred Josiah Smith and aunt to our malevolent matriarch. By ...
The Malevolent Matriarch 