TEG in DB of NEHGS

TL;DR -- We published in The Essex Genealogist (TEG). The NEHGS printed a listing of TEG in their NEHGR. Later, the NEHGS made a database for the TEG issues and are now up to Vol 37 which published in 2017. 

--

First things first. This is the announcement by the American Ancestor publisher of the NEHGS about their making issues of The Essex Genealogist of the Essex Society of Genealogists available via their database. We already tried it today with respect to our last article. 

The Essex Genealogist: Volume 37 (2017) now      

In the middle of the 2010s, we published a few articles in The Essex Genealogist. Later, we published the same article in The Gardner Annals. The following is a list of posts related to those publications. 

Essex Society
of Genealogists

The last one was about the barque Bostonian which was built in New England, roamed the world, and then wrecked along the Oregon border. The owners were Henry D. Gardiner and his brother. 

At the time, we had lots of material related to research along several topics: the captain at the time of the wreck; passengers on that voyage; the town of Gardiner, OR which was founded at the spot; and, of course,  more about the Gardiners who were descendants of Gardiner of Rhode Island. 

• NEHGR 2016 -- Vols 34, May, Aug, Nov; with with pointers to PDFs of Ahnentafel
• TEG, Vol 34, No 3; Vol 35, No 1  -  Benjamin Brown Gardner and his wife Lucy Foster Wilson 
• NEHGR 2017 -- Vol 35, Feb and May
• The Gardiner that was - Extensive research material related to this topic
• TEG, Vol 35, No 2 -- Will republish the barque Bostonian article with updates 

This work got us, landlubers, familiar with some naval issues and terminology. Looking forward to digging deeper. 

Remarks: Modified: 09/26/2025

09/26/2025 - 

Southern campaign

TL;DR -- Lexington & Concord got things going in the spring of 1775. Hence, we have the 250th started this year. The Siege of Boston was still going on (would be until March of 1776). By 1778, the Brit strategy was to go south and perhaps find friendly folks. The events of "Southern theatre" run by General Nathanael Greene starting early in 1781 helped settle that issue. Lord Cornwallis surrendered to General George Washington in October of 1781. The 1783 date aligns with the signing of the Peace Treaty. 

---

As expected, the looking back over 250 years to the Revolution can be a daily thing. We are still in the Siege of Boston which started in the Spring at Lexington & Concord, included the Battle of Bunker Hill and other skirmishes, and will go until March. We wrote recently about Henry Knox bringing cannons from Fort Ticonderoga to an area outside of Boston where the Patriot troops were not visible to the British in Boston. This period will end with the British leaving Boston and going to New York. After not finding success in that area, the focus of the conflice went south. There were still events in the north, but the whole focus changed.

This is where General Nathanael Greene comes in. He had been Quartermaster General for several years. In 1781, General Washington put NG in charge of the war in the south. We got involved with studying this by doing research about the southern troops. In the north, there had been regular militias. As Dr. Frank noted, the leadership had been trained by serving the Crown in the French & Indian affairs. 

Lord Cornwallis had hoped that the southern portion of the country would be more amenable to staying loyal to the Crown. That is something to consider as we review over the next few years.  

Called the Southern theatre (or campaign), this series of battles started in 1778 which was two years after the Declaration of Independence and three years after the first shot was fired in 1775. Having started in early1781, NG won and lost battles. Yet, the War of Revolution was over by October of 1781. The year of 1783 is used since that is when the peace treaty was signed. Between 1781, there may have been continuing conflict, but the main focus was forming the country. 

There is a lot of ground to cover, such as a look at the timeline of the Southern theatre and consider of how what particular areas had a major role in the conflicts and their outcome. 

---

One theme will be Loyalists and what happend to them. For example, see this post -- Henry Gardner, the Loyalist. He left his property in control of an agent in Salem and went north where he had a reputation of being fair, and friendly, with American prisoners. He came back after the war and resumed his life and business. 

Remarks: Modified: 09/18/2025

09/18/2025 - 

Constitution week

TL;DR -- We're still in the period of the Siege of Boston. It's time to leap forward to an event in 1789 which is 14 years later. The signing of the Constitution. 

--

Coming soon is Constitution week. This ought to be better known throughout the U.S. Given that we are in the 250th of the Siege of Boston, we will pay more attention to this day and what it celebrates.

• Constitution week - "This celebration of the Constitution was started by the Daughters of the American Revolution. In 1955, DAR petitioned Congress to set aside September 17-23 annually to be dedicated for the observance of Constitution Week. The resolution was later adopted by the U.S. Congress and signed into public law on August 2, 1956, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower." 

• Constitution Day - "Written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and in operation since 1789, the United States Constitution is the world's longest surviving written charter of government. Its first three words—"We the People"—affirm that the government of the United States exists to serve its citizens. For over two centuries the Constitution has remained in force because its framers wisely separated and balanced governmental powers to safeguard the interests of majority rule and minority rights, of liberty and equality, and of the federal and state governments. Since 1789 the Constitution has evolved through amendments to meet the changing needs of a nation now profoundly different from the 18th-century world in which its creators lived."  

• Constitution of the United States -- "The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America.[3] It superseded the Articles of Confederation, the nation's first constitution, on March 4, 1789. Originally including seven articles, the Constitution defined the foundational structure of the federal government."

Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States

Remarks: Modified: 09/15/2025

09/15/2025 - 

General Nathanael Greene

TL;DR -- To follow up on a Meta (FB) post, we provide a little more information. Several libraries have the thirteen volumes of his Papers. 

---

This post is about General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island. Yesterday, we published a post with some information about the General on Meta (formerly FB). 

Today, we provide a little more information about the General and the thirteen volumes of his papers that was "Published for the Rhode Island Historical Society [by] University of North Carolina Press" starting in 1976. 

• The American Battlefield Trust provides a short biography on the General. 
• Archive org has more information on the publication of his Papers. 
• The General was of old New England heritage (WikiTree; Wikipedia) with his ancestors founding Warwick, RI. 

With the progress computing technology came improvements for library functions. As mentioned, we have already perused Vols I through VI. We expect to see the rest soon. 

Here is an example of a library that has all 13 volumes. 

• KU - Watson Library - this is the full record from the Library catalog. 
• The Library is on the campus in Lawrence, KS. 
• The volumes are in the stacks on the first floor (see Library floor maps)

Remarks: Modified: 09/17/2025

09/14/2025 - Spent glorious time at Watson Library, first visit in a few decades. The whole collection is hardbound. Some references will need updating as some material formerly in Vol VII can be found in Vol X, and so forth. Also, we'll combine this with some D.A.R. research which didn't go far enough. Greene's material will help fill in missing pieces for a lot of families looking to prove an ancestor's service. In this sense, folks. Officers? Known. The enlisted and lower ranks? Not so much. Typical. The internet? Will allow a great bit of equity to come forth. So, that'll be our technology reference as we continue this work. ... So many lessons to be learned from this series. Thank you to whomever responsible. We'll look at that, too. 

09/17/2025 - A couple of years ago, on doing some research, I ran into this snippet. And, this weekend finally got to see the pages and the whole of the series (thirteen volumes). Will report more after assessing these details. 

As mentioned elsewhere, this is a snippet. The pages
are correct but are in Vol. X. The 1976 release
only had the 1st six volumes. The remaining appeared
over the years until the 2020s. 
So, we can get to work and understand the role of
the General and those troops/families that
supported his efforts. 

Why the delay? Being a new publication and with copyright laws (for everyone but GenAI/LLM vendors, it seems), I was not able to read online. And, there was no service that was easily accessible (hint). The first place I went only had the first six volumes. So, I went to another, with fingers crossed that someone had not checked out any of the volumes. But, it was about time for me to get back to the library after doing research on the internet probably 80% of the time. Yes, for 20 years, watching the internet both evolve and devolve. We will discuss which of the sides of that coin was greater (meaning, it's unbalanced). 

Fifteen years ago

TL;DR -- We started in 2010 with our website. The blog came about in Sept of that year. As we learned about history and genealogy, we custom built our website in a minimal fashion in order to spend more time on the domain knowledge. Time and technology has changed. The need for bespoke modes has not and will again be recognized. So, we'll continue down our nonAI approach. Pending research deals with origins. We touch upon the subject and our plan for the future. 

-- 

With the new world of computing being pushed upon us, mainly from the GenAI/LLM incursion on our thoughts in November of 2022 and the ramifications associated with its arrival, we are reorganizing our information. In fifteen years, we have ventured down many paths, made some discoveries, but found more questions than answers. We'll briefly look at origins and son John, because he and Richard were of Nantucket which kept good records.  

Our first post was on 25 Sep 2010 (Welcome). At the time, we had been using Blogger (later purchased by Google) for three years. According to our What's New page, our site was started in September of 2010. This was our first report on that page: 

09/01/2010 -- A blog will be started soon. Questions to ponder will be one topic, such as where was Thomas between 1626 and 1637 (freeman status)? Where is Thomas now (in terms of remains - or, at least, the stones of Abel, etc.) since pavement was put in over the old Gardner burial ground?

Just from the questions, one can see that we had already started to research. The Whereabouts of Thomas became a regular theme and is a now a meme of lost graves. But, number of wives was up there too. This we made progress on thanks to the internet and the appearance of digitized documents from Sherborne, Dorset, UK. 

Our site, originally, was on Microsoft's service of the time which we had for a couple of years. One reason for the choice was to use C# of Asp Net. MS provided their users with a nice tool for creating and managing the information related to small business. We liked that. But, MS decided to move to what became Microsoft 365. 

We decided to drop back to Linux given John's Unix background. But, it was clear. Given how much we needed to learn and organize, we had to spend lots of time on information (domain knowledge). There was little time for development and fiddling with the architecture or actions of the site. So, John snapped little graphics from the Microsoft site and use them in a new page where positioning was handled by the table facilities plus a little CSS. We are documenting this bit of activity (see "Requirement" on this page - technology and practice). Then, as we got better organized, we brought in JS to add actions to our site. 

Again, more time was spent above the floor of configuration and use for knowledge processing with the below the floor technology being done hurriedly. For a HTML editor, we used Sea Monkey. For JS and some HTML and CSS, we just picked up the file with Notepad. Testing was clumbsy in the beginning. But, Google's Chrome's support for the developer's needs improved through time. Once we got into the Google Development session, we were reminded of the full-blown workbench for the developer. 

However, that overload can interfere with proper focus on the knowledge involved. It's a case of hats with each dealing with some domain (technical or conceptual or ...), and the juggling of hats can be fun but eat a lot of time and energy. We'll be back on this topic due to LLM's (and its companions) influence on the environment of computing and on people's and user's understanding of such.  

 ---

On 13 Oct 2010, we mentioned the Folger family. Earlier that year, we had been in Salem, MA and saw a book on John, son of Thomas and Margaret. We have had several posts on John, such as this one: John Gardner and the Merrimack River. Here we asked the question: was John better off with the mathematicians who were doing the survey than his cohorts in Harvard learning about the number of angels on a pinhead? Or partying as we see higher-education affording the opportunity for youngster, many times for the first time. That type of question is as true now as it was then. 

So, we will look at John and the Folgers, primarily due to John's emphasis on the use of Sherborne on the Island of Nantucket. There is a reference to John saying that he heard of it from his father. For starters, here are two pertinent pages. 

• Stories and unwindings - mentions the Folger research which is documented at this site. 
• Nantucket Historical Association: William C. Folger Genealogical Record Books, circa 1850–1900, E – L, circa 1850–1900 Pages 870-945

As we go along, we will discuss a new format and how to structure it. AIn't is apropriate until we hear of substantive movement in the realizations from research. At the same time, we will lay out the basis for the current hype plus explain a working approach of which there will be many proposed over the coming years. 

Post note: Cannot let this post go without mentioning the 15 years of change. Quite frankly, we miss some of the sites that we saw in the 2010 timeframe that represented research by Gardner families over the years. Some sites are still there. Many are not. As we try to build a comprehensive database of Gardner information, we will attempt to disciover some of the older sites through services like the wayback machine (Intenet archive which we have used a lot). At the same time, we have to bring in the modern and futuristic modes being talked about and done. Quite frankly, maturity seems lacking in a lot of these approaches. But, that's a side issue. At regular points, we'll review our progress and trace the pros/cons. Right now, we see no reason to not continue with the bespoke approach. Anyone who wants to touch code can help. Tools? We have minimal but that can change. Vibe coding? Prompts? Some of that is reasonable. But, people are the core of interpretation and judgment. Not machines. Yet.  

PS (sort of thing): With the huge Rorschach Test thrown upon us about three years ago (Nov 2022) and the ramifications seen and potentially realized, I never went with the offer of LLM's enticement of  purty prose. Nope. Actually, except for spelling, these posts will not be checked except by human editors without tools other than pen (real or imaginary). Too, we retain the right to update grammar, et al, as time pases. All edits will be noted within remarks as we have been doing from the beginning. ... People are going to be the focus.   

Remarks: Modified: 09/06/2025

09/06/2025 - Spelling correction. PS added.