Genealogy Ensemble

Lately, I came into possession of a family heirloom, a book of poems, that allows me to see deep into the heart and mind of one of my great grandfathers, a rare gift for a genealogist.

I didn’t inherit this book from a relation: I got it off the Internet! And it took quite a few years for the book to find its way home.

Initially, I knew just...

My great-grandfather, John Deakin, wrote that Thomas Deakin (1853-1935), my 2 times great-grandfather led a “great life of integrity and honour, was stern but kind, true as steel in uprightness in all his dealings, a pattern of level sober thought.” This was in a letter sent to his son, George Deakin, my grandfather, who lived in Canada, far from the rest of his family in Eng...

Seventeenth-century New Englanders were wary of strangers. In Springfield, Massachusetts, newcomers had to be approved by the town residents before they could stay for more than a month, but when John Bagg moved to Springfield around 1657, he not only stayed, he married the daughter of one of the town’s leading citizens.

John’s origins are obscure, but once he settl...

Consider Moseley (1675-1755), of Westfield, Massachusetts had an unusual name. In Puritan New England, where he was born, people normally named their children after close relatives1 or gave them Biblical names, but the origin of Consider’s name is a mystery. Maybe his parents had good imaginations: they called one of his brothers Comfort.

Whatever the origin of his ...