Have you done any “Pre-learning” for our next speakers? What do I mean by that? Our next 2 speakers focus on New England in various ways. The first thing I have done is work backwards from myself and find the New Englanders in each family group, at least the most recent.

I am going to make a confession. The first thing I did was define New England, which states are considered New England. I apologize to all my history and geography teachers from the past. (By the way – Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. But you knew that!)

My New England roots seem to be Vermont and Massachusetts. Most recently from 1750 to 1900. I decided to do that background work that we talked about earlier and to look at my paternal side. So here we come 3x GG in Vershire, Orange County, Vermont.

I am trying to establish a consistent workflow. You know what I mean. First this and then that for each research project. As a beginner I started with myself and got interviews with relatives and looked for artifacts. As I move further down the generations that part has been done so where do I start each project? Remembering past speakers that we have discussed in this blog, background on the location seems the place to start, if the location is new. By looking at the background information of the area first maybe I can find out a bit about this family and get some hints on new information like what jobs they might have had, why they moved to and from places. Thanks to someone who applied for DAR in the past, I have some pretty good identifiers about the people, dates and places.

History lesson:  Vermont was discovered by Samuel de Champlain. They raised Merino Sheep early on. Vershire specifically got its name by combining Vermont and New Hampshire. Jimmy Buffet called this, “useless but important information.” But was it? Religions in the area were Congregational, Baptist, Roman Catholic, and Methodist. Maybe that will be useful down the road.

My next step was to create a timeline with the couple to see what I had and what I needed. By doing this I can see generally when they moved from Vermont, but I still have some work to do to see why they might have left and a more defined time for when. I am pretty confident in the genealogy of this line back to 6x GG in Massachusetts so it is about filling in details of their lives as best I can. You know the history stuff.

You may have noticed I have not given you names. This is again because it is not about my family but about the process. Doing the background work and the timeline can give me ideas on where to look from there. I am guessing that the speaker will share her best places depending on the locations and the time frame. Let’s see what she can tell us.

Heidi Geise, education@hqrl.com