Relics: Genealogy, family stories, history & other curiosities.

      I can hardly believe that it's time for yet another year end review of my family history research.  Where does the time go?        My biggest challenges continue to be time and distance.  I struggle to find a balance between doing all I want to do with my research and maintaining this woefully neglected blog with work and my other real life obligations.  I also continue to work around the fact that for now, I am miles away from the areas I want to research and can't run out to the local history room of the New City Library with a question, take a leisurely stroll through the cemetery or drive by an old family home.  I continue to learn how to be a different kind of researcher.       I spent time this year learning about my Schuler family and how they made it from France to New Orleans to New York. I obtained death certificates and made other connections using newspapers (English and French!) and probate r...

This time last week I was busy packing up everything I needed to evacuate for Hurricane Irma.  My mom, two neighbors and I were leaving the coast of Florida and heading inland to hopefully avoid the worst of it and to get out of our house in the flood zone. Filling the car with people, groceries, bedding and whatever else you may need for an undetermined amount of time and leaving is scary stuff.  This was my first serious hurricane experience.  I am a New Yorker, we buy bread and milk and wait for the plow. We stored important documents, photos and sentimental things up high.  I took all my genealogy folders, books and files and put them in plastic storage boxes lined with garbage bags and placed them on top of my bed.  I covered them with more garbage bags and blankets.  It broke my heart a little to leave them behind, but under these circumstances this was the best I could do.  I said a prayer and drove to safety.  The predictions changed m...

Olga Poyhonen is my maternal great grandmother and one of my family's most recent immigrants.  Olga traveled to New York from Nilisa, Finland to live with her older sister after the death of her father.  She traveled alone, in steerage, and came to work as a seamstress with her sister, Minna.    I am still learning about Olga and her sister.  I will have a lot more to say about her and how I came to have this picture of her and her young son soon.   I didn't want this day to end without posting about Olga.  It was on this date, May 11, 1893 that Olga first disembarked in the great city of New York and began her life in America.  She was 14 years old.  

One of my lofty genealogy goals for this year is, after years of neglect, to spend time focused on my paternal lines.  It was my mother's family that first piqued my curiosity in genealogy and so for years, they captured most of my attention.   Elizabeth Cassidy Schuler is my two times great grandmother.  That is reasonably close, I should know something, or at least more than I do about her.  I find her to be mysterious and intriguing and I am determined to learn more.   The earliest documentation I can find for Elizabeth Cassidy is the 1855 New York State Census.  She is 5 years old, referred to as Betsy Ann, the daughter of George and Mary Cassidy.  She is their second child of eight and the oldest girl.  From 1855 to 1870, the Cassidy's live in Ward 14 in lower Manhattan, spanning 15 years they move from Election District 1, to 3, to 4 where I have discovered they lived at 130 Prince Street .  An interesting neighborhood now, for su...