Heather Wilkinson Rojo's Blog (118)

This is a continuation of story of my family history related trip to Hawaii for the past two weeks. Our first day was full of meeting “new” cousins and seeing historic sites related to the Dominis family and Queen Lili’uokalani. This next day we checked out of our hotel on Waikiki Beach, Oahu to board a cruise ship to see the islands of Maui, Hawaii and Kauai. This was the vacation part of the trip,…

This is a description of my family history related visit to Hawaii for the past two weeks. We arrived Honolulu in the early evening, bleary eyed and exhausted, so to me the Hawaii trip really started on Day Two. Our first night we checked into a hotel on Waikiki Beach, ate a bite for dinner, and I took a dip in the pool. Later, whilst walking along Waikiki Beach hubby took a dip in the ocean, too. We…

A story for the Fourth of July!

Fifteen or twenty years ago, when my daughter was in elementary school, we visited Philadelphia Pennsylvania. We toured the city, saw the Liberty Bell and Ben Franklin’s house, and ate some cheese steak sandwiches. Of course we didn’t miss Independence Hall, either. The tour was guided, and when we came to the room where the Continental Congress…

Pine Grove Cemetery, Winnacunnet Road, Hampton, New Hampshire.

William Lane, junior. and his wife Sarah…

Some historical facts:

Upon hearing of the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, Princess Ka’iulani left England for the United States. They landed at New York City. On March 4, 1893, the day before Grover Cleveland’s inauguration as President, the seventeen year old Princess Ka’iulani and her…

A story to celebrate the 145th Juneteenth

How did a runaway slave from Philadelphia come to New Hampshire? And why was she instantly recognized? Well, she belonged to George Washington, and he had served the last part of his presidency in Philadelphia. Elizabeth, daughter of Senator John Langdon, had seen this slave woman…

Michiel Ockers Hogerzeijl was the captain of a whaling ship from 1729 to 1759. He lived in Holland and hunted for whales off the coast of Greenland. His father, Ocker Bruins Hoogerseijl, was also a commander of a whaling ship from 1720 to 1730. There is a Hogerzeil Street in the town of Krimpen aan de Lek, Holland, where they lived. In…

My regular blog is Nutfield Genealogy at www.nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com where I blog about Londonderry and Derry, New Hampshire local history and genealogy in general for our our part of New England. This was one of my most popular blogs last month, not just for local people,…

Sometime in February 1945 my…

An assortment of interesting names pulled from my database. Every one of them is an actual name!

I suppose that some of these names were fashionable in their own time. My name, Heather, is now a popular name, but when my mother first named me the pediatrician said “That’s a dog’s…

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…

A few months ago we took a vacation to Puerto Rico. It's the perfect place to explore early American Colonial History. San Juan was founded in 1521, and the explorer Ponce de Leon was one of…

I learned about this idea from Martin Holleck at the “Slovak Yankee” blog. He posted a list of compiled genealogies that contain his closest ancestors. It is amazing how making up a list like this shows the holes in my research, or perhaps the need for me to put together some sort of a book or genealogical article for some of these…

In this family photo, Moises was pasted in…

The Lennox Inn, a bed and breakfast, is located at 69 Fox Street in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Lunenburg is a pretty town on the coast, famous for being the berth of the “Bluenose” schooner, found on the Canadian dime. The United Nations has designated the entire town of Lunenburg as a World Heritage Site. It is the oldest continuously…