I have a weird habit. I can go to a cemetery and take photographs incidentally of something that I will go back later, sometimes years later, and deliberately search for. Yes, yes, the human mind is good at finding patterns in the chaos. But it has happened often enough that it’s weird. Case in point.Continue reading “Looking for a Priest”
Category Archives: History
A Crimean War Veteran
How many American cemeteries can claim to have a Crimean War veteran? Well, York’s Prospect Hill Cemetery does. Doctor Henry L. Smyser, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, worked as a Surgeon Major in the Crimean War, and a decade later assigned to a military hospital in York. It being a warm-ish October Sunday,Continue reading “A Crimean War Veteran”
Washington at the Start of the Civil War
Our tale beings with an ebook. I subscribe to Early Bird Books’ daily emails of discounted ebooks. Friday they usually send out a multi-category sale, and on Sundays there’s usually a history-specific sale. At some point along they way, they offered Lucinda Prout Janke’s A Guide to Civil War Washington, DC, a book that isContinue reading “Washington at the Start of the Civil War”
Some Perspective
I love listening to Howard Bryant on Weekend Edition Saturday, but damn, that fridge got thoroughly nuked.
Genealogy by Twitter
There’s a photographer on Twitter, Jim Havard, who often posts photographs of Congressional Cemetery. He lives in the neighborhood near the cemetery, and he gets some fantastically beautiful imagery of the old graves. I often look at his photos and wonder, “Do I know this spot? Do I see my family?” I did, after all,Continue reading “Genealogy by Twitter”
A Genealogical Find
A few days ago I bought In the Shadow of the United States Capitol: Congressional Cemetery and the Memory of the Nation, a history of the historic cemetery in Washington, DC, by Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson. I didn’t know of this book before Sunday; then I received a email about a saleContinue reading “A Genealogical Find”
The Christmas Truce of 1914
It has taken me the better part of six years to find the audio for this program, and last night I finally did. On Christmas Eve 2014, BBC Radio 2 broadcast All Is Calm, a program on the Christmas Truce of 1914, narrated by Sir John Hurt. Hurt, while in treatment for pancreatic cancer, participatedContinue reading “The Christmas Truce of 1914”
A Mid-19th-Century View of Harrisburg
While poking around on the Internet this afternoon, I found something that would excite me — a bird’s eye view painting of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, done by an artist for Edward Sachse’s company in 1855. Sasche is an artist I’ve mentioned before in conjunction with my family genealogy — he did bird’s eye view maps ofContinue reading “A Mid-19th-Century View of Harrisburg”
The Grave of a 19th-Century Astronomer
Before the world went into its COVID-imposed lockdown, I discovered, quite by chance, while reading about Mary Ann Hall, that a photograph of my great-great-grandfather’s gravesite in Washington, DC’s Congressional Cemetery is on Wikipedia. No one but me would care that, in the background of the photo, is the gravesite of William Gardner, but it’sContinue reading “The Grave of a 19th-Century Astronomer”
Exploring Georgetown, 1890
I saw this on Twitter Wednesday morning. It’s a photograph from the Georgetown University archives of Georgetown in 1890, looking out at the Washington Monument, taken from Georgetown’s Healy Hall. In the fall, I wrote about digging into a street map of Washington, circa 1883 and using it to find where my ancestors lived inContinue reading “Exploring Georgetown, 1890”