Heather Wilkinson Rojo's Blog – May 2010 Archive (6)

Often I am asked about town meetings and other terms pertaining to New England town government by people researching their roots from outside of New England. They see the annual reports in the archives, and have questions about the terminology, and the form of government. If you have ever seen Norman Rockwell’s paintings of the “Four Freedoms,” I think the painting of the young farmer standing up to…

United Shoe Machinery Corporation was a major employer in Beverly, Massachusetts. The locals called it “The Shoe,” and when it began manufacturing in 1902 it was the largest factory in the world at that time. By World War I it employed over 5,000 workers. Founded in 1899, they produced machines for the shoe industry, and it was one of…

I sometimes post some of the stories from my blog on the website GenealogyWise.com. I had almost stopped doing this when I received a message through GenealogyWise.com about the Essie Mott memoirs. This resulted in a lot of fun blogging connections and many blog posts, so I continue to post a few stories on GenealogyWise, just to see…

I recently explored the Internet…

My husband’s father was born in Sinovas, a little village in the province of Burgos, Spain. It’s an old village, with an ancient Romanesque church built in the 13^th century. The tower was restored in a major project proposed to cost almost 1 million Euros in 2009. The people here are farmers, and some families own old wine cellars on the edge of town, dug deep into the earth by hand. We…

“El Archivo Diocesano de Burgos” is the archive for church records in the city of Burgos, Spain, located at the Archbishop’s palace next to the Burgos Cathedral. This northern city is also famous as the hometown of “El Cid”, the famous warrior also known as Francisco Diaz de Vivar, the national hero of Spain. Any church records no longer held at the individual churches are stored here. So, any very…