Starting a New Series on Genealogy

Gee whiz, I had 39 page views on the day I didn't post ( a near record) and only 19 posts the next day when I did post. I guess that's a great example of how can I miss you if you won't go away!

We're going to be offering a local history course at the Historical Society this fall followed by a genealogy course in the spring. I have been using Ancestry.com as a research aid for both subjects for several years, but Ancestry requires a paid membership for all but the most basic research. Today, I spent most of my "blog time" looking at the Mormons mostly free FamilySearch.org website and will be posting on comparing the two sites.

It's a running joke in my family that we should be filing a wrongful death suit against the Pequot owners of Foxwoods for killing Uncle Jack Oldham way back in 1637. It's the incident that started the Pequot War. Now anyone whose nickname was "Mad Jack" probably did something that deserved killing, but think of the millions of dollars in interest alone! This was all a joke until yesterday when I learned of a lawyer on the North Shore who is taking cases from descendents of the executed Salem witches who feel their family names have been unfairly defamed. It's indeed true that at least some descendents of convicted witch Rebecca Nurse felt so embarrassed that they cleverly changed their names to Nourse (still pronounced Nurse. OK, they weren't that clever.) to hide the connection. Now the evidence is pretty solid that "witchcraft" was practiced in Salem Village, now Danvers; but Rebecca Nurse was the most innocent of all the accused. You can still visit the Nurse homestead in Danvers. According to legend, Rebecca was secretly dug up from the witch's common grave in Salem Town and reburied under the hearth of her home.