Or, Who Gave What to Whom? In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, marriage notices in local newspapers would sometimes include a list of the wedding presents received by the happy couple, along with the names of the gift-givers….
Continue reading →I have lost the contact info for the reader who contacted me in April 2014, with a query about William Fitzgerald and his wife Ellen, who emigrated from Ireland to Hastings Co., Ontario. But: I have recently heard from someone…
Continue reading →“Could you look up Mary Hogan?” asked my dad’s cousin Aggie. “I think she may have been,” and this added sotto voce, as if, even after so many years, there might yet be something to hide, “a Home Girl.”1 A…
Continue reading →Also: Margaret Devine and Thomas William Sullivan, Home Children Thomas Lanctot [here spelled Langtoe] is found in the household of Thomas Burke and Mary Ann Lahey in the 1901 Canadian census (Ontario, Carleton, March, p. 2, family no. 15). He…
Continue reading →Nowadays we tend to think of someone as having a ‘real’ name, with nicknames and diminutives as informal variations on that one official and authentic version of the name. A person’s ‘real’ name is what appears on the birth certificate,…
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