Cool or Creepy?

https://youtu.be/t_GuCuqixPo I just found MyHeritage's Deep Nostalgia page where it's possible to upload a photograph of an ancestor and get a short animated video of what they may have looked like moving in real life. It's freaking cool, but a bit creepy, too. Here is the photograph I uploaded of my 2nd great grandfather, Deforest …

William Gilman’s Obituary

One of the best finds for a family historian is a long narrative obituary. The details within it can illuminate the dark passages of a distant relative's life. It's been a long while, almost a year and 2 months, since I posted on this blog. I had let my Ancestry.com account lapse because I was …

Great Grandma Gilman’s Ginger Cookie Recipe

Great Grandma Clara Doty Gilman's recipe for ginger cookies. The recipe above is out of a family cookbook that Ella Gilman Jones' family put together. Ella was my grandmother's, Gladys Gilman Heselton's, younger sister. My dad and his cousin, Frank (Nina Gilman Morgan's son), remember sneaking some of these cookies from their grandmother's freezer at …

Context: The Historical Currents that Moved Them … Maybe …

I drove over to Middletown Springs, Vermont on Sunday to a memorial gathering for my Dad's cousin, Corinne, who had passed away the previous Tuesday. The family in attendance all descended from the daughters of Leon Elstine and Clara Doty Gilman, my great grandparents. One of my Dad's cousins, Frank, is a lay preacher and …

Context: Family Farming

Mt. Pico, Mt. Killington, and Mt. Shrewsbury from Rutland R.R., Green Mountains(Picture credit: loc.gov)[1] I read an article this morning that got me thinking about the inherent acceptance of the family farm in the history of the American psyche. It seems to be a given that Americans just farmed. It's an idea that is backed …

Context: Maple Sugaring in Vermont

(Photo © Casey Jennings) [Editor's Note: I am excited to have my first guest contributor! Introducing Casey Jennings, a Gilman cousin, possibly by birth but most definitely by practice, to talk about his experience and to give some historical context about maple sugaring in Vermont. I first met Casey on this blog a few months …

Bartlett v Gilman

My 4th great grandfather Simon Gilman's actual signature on a promissory note from 1817. Back on 1 March when I went to the Grafton County Register of Deeds in Haverhill, NH, I came across a listing for a document in the deed index that was not a land deed and was not located in the …

Context: Apples!

Photo by Anna Kaminova on Unsplash Simon had a small apple orchard in Shrewsbury, VT and the town where he was most likely born, Meredith, NH, was known for its apple orchards, so I'm going down the apple rabbit hole in hopes of contextualizing his life around the apple. In the apple-growing North, rural Americans used most of …

Interdisciplinarity and Perspectives

Stone wall bounding an old overgrown apple orchard at the Gilman Farm in Shrewsbury, VT One thing that I learned in grad school (thank you Goddard College!) is that interdisciplinarity underlies all successful research. Any topic can be looked at under the light of any discipline. Maybe that's too broad of a brush, but why …

Context: 1812 New Hampshire

Simon Gilman lived on that little peninsula sticking out to the right of "Salem" into Lake "Winnipissioki". I have other maps from various eras of this same location on the post Range 1 Lot 1 Near the Great Wares. Go back and take a look to see this map in context with the maps I …