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Heather Wilkinson Rojo's Blog – November 2009 Archive (11)

A Big Appetite, He must have loved Thanksgiving!

My mom found this little news clipping amongst her mother’s things. We finally figured out that the main character in the little story was her great grandmother’s brother. John Edwin Healey worked in the family business, Hoogerzeil Express Company. This was a Beverly, Massachusetts trucking and moving business started in the days before motorized vehicles. In the 1949 article it says he just celebrated his 92nd birthday, but I found him in the… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 25, 2009 at 2:04pm — No Comments

The Other Mayflowers, Voyage 5

The Wreck of the "Angel Gabriel"

The Great migration was an exodus of Puritans from England to New England between 1620 and 1640. During this time John Winthrop sailed on the “Arabella” and wrote his famous sermon about the “City on a Hill” during the voyage. Most of my ancestors arrived in this period, on many ships, mostly unrecorded by passenger lists. One ship carried the most ancestors (besides the Mayflower), and that was the… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 23, 2009 at 8:41am — No Comments

The Other Mayflowers, Voyage 4

The Hessian Soldier who stayed in the New World

Part four in my Thanksgiving series about ancestors who DIDN’T arrive in the New World on the Mayflower. My 4x great grandfather Johann Daniel Bollman was a surgeon from Hammersleben in Saxony, Germany. He came to North America with Baron de Riedesel’s Brunswick Regiment of Hessian Soldiers in 1776. The Duke of Brunswick had contracted with England to send 3,964 foot soldiers and cavalry to America.… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 19, 2009 at 9:00am — No Comments

The Other Mayflowers, Voyage 3

Prisoner of War aboard the ship “John and Sara”

From Scotland to Boston, 1651

This is part three of my miniseries of Thanksgiving blogs on the immigration of certain ancestors to America, during the week when our thoughts usually rest with our Mayflower passenger ancestors. My 7x great grandfather William Munroe arrived in Massachusetts a little more than thirty years after the Pilgrims settled in Plymouth. His immigration was forced as a prisoner of war and indentured servant,… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 18, 2009 at 8:30pm — No Comments

The Other Mayflowers, Voyage 2

Unknown Ship, from Rotterdam to Salem, Massachusetts

This is part two of a series of Thanksgiving blogs for my ancestors who DIDN’T come on the Mayflower. Today I’m thinking about my 3x great grandfather Peter Hoogerzeil. We don’t know the name of the ship he took to arrive in America, and we don’t know the date, but the other details of his immigration are so interesting my cousin wants to write them into a historical romance. I’ll… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 17, 2009 at 9:00am — No Comments

The Other Mayflowers Series

1960 Lockheed Constellation- Madrid to New York City

This week before Thanksgiving will be dedicated to blogging about my other family members and ancestors who came to the New World, not just my Mayflower ancestors. There are a lot to choose from, but I’m going to start with my mother and father-in-law, who arrived in New York City in 1960 aboard an Iberia Airlines Lockheed Constellation prop plane from Madrid, Spain. It was 340… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 16, 2009 at 9:00am — No Comments

How to find your American Veteran Ancestors

Abijah Franklin Hitchings, Civil War, Co. I, 8th Reg. Mass. Vol. Inf.

Veterans Day 2009

The further your family tree goes back in time, the more chances you have of finding an ancestor, sibling, or distant cousin who served as a soldier or sailor. My first advice is to continue collecting oral histories, and asking all your older relatives about anyone they might have known who served in the military. Use those oral… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 11, 2009 at 9:30am — No Comments

The Ballad of Cassandra Southwick

“Ballad of Cassandra Southwick”

For Bill West's Great American Local Poem Genealogy Challenge

There are lots of interesting characters in New England, like Cassandra, and many have had their stories made into poems. Longfellow tangled the story of another ancestor, Myles Standish, in his famous courtship poem, and the story of Paul Revere was one of his most famous, and most inaccurate, poems. In this poem, John Greenleaf Whittier got… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 9, 2009 at 7:00am — No Comments

Google Your way to a Quilt

Google your way to a Quilt

Sometimes after I’ve tried the library, the archives, ancestry.com and NEHGS- I next resort to finding genealogy information is just Googling names to see what comes up. Now, with the addition of Google Books, I’m often surprised at what happens. And sometimes names that didn’t draw any hits six months ago suddenly have interesting results. This is what happened to me last week.

My Munroe lineage… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 6, 2009 at 10:37am — No Comments

Bumping into Great Great Great Grandma

Leavitt Cemetery, Chichester, New Hampshire

Not too far north of Nutfield is Chichester, New Hampshire. My mother’s grandmother was a Batchelder, and she was born in Chichester, but the family lived in Boston. Their roots were on the New Hampshire seacoast, because the first Batchelder in the New World was the Reverend Stephen Batchelder, who founded Hampton. The Batchelders didn’t have their roots in Chichester, but all the brides,… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 4, 2009 at 1:32pm — 2 Comments

Mill Girls from Derry and Londonderry

Country Girls in the Big City

Years ago I took my Londonderry Girl Scout troop to Lowell National Park, to see how the mill girls lived and worked. The girls were about twelve years old, not much younger than some of the mill workers in the 1830s and 40s. We took a canal boat ride, and toured the noisy Boot Mill (a big hit for kids) and finally went into the boarding house. We earned a merit badge with some of our activities in… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 2, 2009 at 7:28pm — No Comments