Gardner Research started in 2010 from a blank slate, more or less, using the wonders of the www; in other words, trolling the waters of the internet to see what we could find. The result? Lots of stuff, some of which we have organized. And, there is a lot more work to do.
As we have seen, records get digitized and come online.
Sherborne, Dorset is an example as their records allowed us access to lots more about Margaret and Thomas. See the discussions on
WikiTree. Notice two things: this is a profile of Thomas sponsored by a Great Migration Project using Anderson's book (1986); Margaret is given as Thomas' spouse and mother of the children. As well are records coming on-line, people write.
A very good example, that is relevant, is
salem.wickedlocal.com. Early on, we saw an article by John Goff:
Looking at Salem’s beginnings: The White and Gardner family contributions. This article published in 29 Dec 2007. That was eleven years ago; we saw it four years later and noticed that it mentioned Rev. John White.
One of our first activities was to start the Thomas Gardner (planter) page on Wikipedia and have added several other pages or links. A good example might be when there were news stories about Amelia Earhart's plane.
Gardner Island was mentioned; so, we had to look at that (as we have with other areas:
Gardner Junction,
Gardner, CO,
Gardiner, OR). And, John got into that story, too.
I well remember John's first email. He congratulated us as he had run across our Wikipedia tagging (put link to Thomas Gardner's page in that of
Gideon Gardner). I do not know if he wrote about Gardner Island, but we did discuss
Gardner's Beacon. And, John was kind enough to contribute articles as well as provide other information to support our research (thank you, John). I thought that it might be a good task to itemize John's work, especially as it relates to Gardner studies. See the list below which is provided as a reminder to us to look further into the articles. On the list, too, are Salem articles that mention Gardner.
First, though, here are a couple of examples of overlap interest. On our
Gardner Gate page (portal to truth), we just did a summary of some pre-arrival information (
1 March 2013 - the 2nd most read post) pulling information from a series of Gardner's Beacon issues. Then, I just found this article by John --
Salem’s forgotten French heritage (7 June 2008) -- in which he details French activities in the area that became Salem. He mentions the discussions with the American Indian. There are several articles that we will look at further.
But, another example, is the work that we did to track down information about the owner of the barque, Bostonian, that wrecked (Oct 1850) at what became
Gardiner, OR (update - 30 October 2018). The original work was done in 2014 with an article published in
The Essex Genealogist. The owner was a descendant of George of Rhode Island, though, two of his wives were descendants of Thomas Gardner of Salem. But, as well as the family information, there is a whole lot to discuss about the time (
More on the Gold Rush 31 Mar 2016).
Here, I see that John wrote about a response to a query (1990s) from San Francisco (
NAUMKEAG NUGGETS: Salem in the California Gold Rush 5 Jun 2015) about a ship that they discovered. It had been built in Salem.
From what I have seen, hundreds of ships were abandoned as crews rushed off to pan gold. That makes the Bostonian different in that not only did it bring supplies from Boston to San Francisco (July 1849 to January 1850 voyage - only four passengers - it was loaded), it went then to New Zealand (that was interesting, verifying that part of its journey), returned to San Francisco, and wrecked in Oregon is October of 1850.
Many went to California by land. We have researched that avenue, as well, due to our interest in the western expansion. Too, New England (and Salem) had the reach of a long arm. A third way to the gold fields was boating down to Central America, trudging across, then boating back up to what is now known as the Left Coast. This went both ways (many lost their fortune in that journey).
There are other examples in an endless set of things to research. So, gems, indeed. Finally, to a partial list of John's Gardner touch. Each item is marked by date; there is no obvious order, yet.
Remarks: Modified: 08/27/2022
02/08/2019 -- Recently, we got registered with Google as non-profit and have put a search facility on the sites. They are (will be) ad-free, once I get the administrative stuff completed. On the search page, I mention our manual effort at indexing. Now, we can get more serious. I extended the above list with some hits from searching on John Goff.
02/08/2019 -- Put photo of John Goff from 5 Jun 2015 article, Naumkeag Nuggets.
09/03/2019 -- Like the way John writes (see image). He mentions
Sidney which is good. Dr. Frank and his sister, Lucie, picked up Sidney's work after he stopped his Essex wanderings and writings. This is an example of John's view (seen after I had, more or less, determined the same thing).
It was in this house where Thomas and Margaret enjoyed
Cape Ann's wonderful life (posts search on
Cape Ann).
04/20/2021 -- John mentioned in a
Melissa Berry article (with reference to Richard Davenport). On
New France and New Spain. We see it more out west. ... Added link to page of Gideon Gardner, who was namesake of Gardner Island (by either
Joshua Gardner or
Joshua Coffin).
