"If Careful Nursing Will Cure Them They Shall Have It"

"That Martha Ballard kept her diary is one small miracle; that her descendants saved it is another." Laurel Thatcher Ulrich "The fact that these tattered and fading notebooks have survived is overwhelming. Berea carried the 1862 diary as he boarded the steamer Seashore and started the trip

So That All May Eat

"Even before the famine began, a writer in the Daily Picayune had used Ireland as a benchmark for misery across the British empire, contending that 'the condition of the most abject slave in the Colonies is, in my opinion, better far than that of the unfortunate Irish peasant.

Mesmerized and Bamboozled: Resisting Tech's Spectacular Sales Pitches

This week, a brief item in Munsell's The Annals of Albany (v. 10) grabbed me. Looking for leads about whether my ancestors participated in the Anti-Rent Rebellion, I found an account of a spectacle instead. It was recorded in January 1838, a year before Stephen Van Rensselaer&

Nations within a Nation: Perspectives on 250 Years

The Executive Order to change the Gulf of Mexico's name in January 2025 foreshadowed more "Donroe Doctrine" to follow. In a year and a half, the president has proclaimed his designs on many countries. He's declared aspirations to absorb, govern, renovate, conquer or subjugate

Honoring Histories: Setting Stories in Dialogue With Each Other

Last month, after I participated in Montreal's annual March to the Stone, I wrote about that tragic hidden history. The famine walk honors the site where an estimated 6,000 Irish immigrants—most of whom died of "ship fever" (typhus) in the summer of 1847—lie

Eviction and Sovereignty

"They don't look often enough at context, past or present. Instead, they seem to see each moment as an independent crisis—or a recent one—often missing how many times the same dynamics have played out or indicators of how to proceed have already appeared." Andrea

Positive Offerings: When Donations Mean Life

So many images of suffering pass before us, it's difficult to feel that our individual acts make any difference. This feeling is magnified when powerful governments fail to act humanely or adequately. But a recurring theme of my posts is that individual actions have cumulative effects and matter

Refusing to Surrender: Democracy is an Unfinished Story

Picture the same year, in two rural landscapes divided by the Atlantic ocean. Ireland, 1839: William Gray, my great-great grandfather, is born in Ireland, near Ballyjamesduff. One of five children, William helped his family grow grain and raise geese. The farm's soil was so poor, his son

Property, Survival, and Solidarity: A Prelude

History has been showing me its tantalizing side. Various ancestors' histories and journeys are linking together, and I'm sensing them spanning across time to this present place. By place, I mean not only where I live in upstate New York, but also the place we're

Representations: What Shows Up in Our Stories, Art, and DNA

This week I've been following exciting leads, finding new and converging throughlines. Some of my excitement stems from what my DNA results reveal about my place in a much larger web. Ancestry.com's appropriately-named Thrulines option displays matches and compares trees. When shown in list

Beneath Our Feet: Hidden Histories

"I think it marks our maturity as a people that remembrance has become an act of self-awareness." Irish President Mary Robinson Someone on social media recently lamented the fact that we haven't adequately memorialized or collectively grieved our pandemic losses. This made me think of

Names Mapped onto the Land: Relating to Place

When you look at a map of your local region, what do you relate to? Or do you ever even look? What are your associations with this place, or perhaps with another one from a formative time? What are your significant landmarks? Are they natural or human-made? Communal, institutional