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Reading Old Ink: A Paleography Guide for Family Letters
When a stack of creased envelopes arrives from a cousin in Adelaide or surfaces in a Tupperware box in the laundry cupboard, who among us is not tempted to set…
Elizabeth Telford South 1845-1920: A Family Record from the Telford Line
Elizabeth Telford South was born in 1845 and died in 1920, spanning three quarters of the nineteenth century and the first troubled years of the twentieth. Her…
Living in a centuries-old Barcelona flat through a home exchange
The first evening in the flat began with the sound of keys turning in a heavy iron lock, the kind that has opened ten thousand times since the building was…
The Glow of the Oil Lamp in the Telford Parlor
An oil lamp gives a room more than light. Its small flame gathers faces, furniture, and family stories into one warm circle, turning an ordinary evening into…
The Brighton Family’s 1910 Census: A Snapshot of a Household
A census entry can make a family history feel briefly inhabited. Names, ages, occupations and places of birth turn a line in a pedigree into a household with…
Great-Aunt Mary McCarthy's doily and the long threads of family memory
The doily arrived in a square of pale tissue paper, inside a cardboard shoebox that smelled of cedar and old wool. My cousin sent it from her mother's flat in…
Uncle Thomas Brighton's pocket knife and the words around it
I have kept a small essay about Uncle Thomas Brighton's pocket knife in my files for years, moving it from folder to folder as I reorganised the family papers.…
A family on the move: the McCarthy relocation from Pennsylvania to Ohio
Wagon ruts still show in the soil of eastern Ohio, and the surnames carved into nineteenth-century headstones there tell a familiar story. The McCarthys of…
A South family livestock ledger from 1870
Tucked away in the Hackworth family archive sits a leather-bound account book kept by an ancestor of the South family. Its pages, faded to the colour of weak…
Loni’s How-To: Interviewing Elderly Relatives for Oral Histories
An oral history preserves more than names and dates. It captures the pause before an answer, the nickname nobody wrote down, the sound of a kitchen during…