My paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Adsit, known as Libby, is the grandparent with the least number of close family, specifically first cousins. I have no first cousins, second cousins, or third cousins on this specific ancestral line. I showed this graphically at Descendants of my Great-Grandparents and in a list at Counting Third Cousins.
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| Elizabeth Adsit, circa 1913, about 16 years old |
Earlier this week, while reading an article in The Boston Globe about one of the oldest American coins being put up for auction, I thought I saw a familiar name and checked my family tree.
John Hull, authorized as "mintmaster" by the Massachusetts General Court in 1652, is my 8th great grandfather.
He and a colleague, Robert Sanderson, established a mint in Boston, about where Macy's currently is located, according to the Boston Globe article. The earliest coins minted in America were at this mint in Boston in 1652. The men continued to mint coins for several decades, but all were dated 1652 to be able to claim that the coins were made during the period right after the English Civil War. (Otherwise minting of coins in the colonies was a treasonous act!)
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| Image from The Boston Globe article |
John Hull was born in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, England, on December 18, 1624, to Robert and Elizabeth Hull. The family immigrated to Boston in 1635, where his father, was granted 25 acres for farming, though he primarily worked as a blacksmith.
Recently, my brothers and I were going through some items that had come from my mother's collection of family treasures.
Some items had symbols on them that needed to be deciphered.
The first items were relatively easy to decipher. This pendant has the Greek letters Beta Theta Pi. It is just under an inch in diameter and is stored in this small leather case.
Grandfather Lowell Townsend Copeland attended Northwestern University in the early 1920s. He was a proud member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity. I shared information from his school yearbook at What Else You Can Find in Yearbooks.
A cenotaph is a cemetery marker placed in honor of a person whose remains are elsewhere.
I have a few ancestors who have what appear to be two burial locations, but it turns out that they are buried in one place and have a cenotaph in another.
My second great-grandmother, Sarah (Lowell) Copeland, was born in Calais, Maine, in 1833, living there until the death of her husband, Henry Clay Copeland in 1912 (in Calais). Soon after, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to live with her daughter, Katherine (Copeland) Dunbar and her husband, William Dunbar. When she died on January 9, 1916, her remains were buried in the Copeland-Dunbar plot (Cherry Avenue, Section 6, Lot 49) in Forest Hills Cemetery, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, a neighborhood of Boston, not too far from Cambridge.
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| S. L. C. 1833 - 1916 |
FamilySearch Full Search Text is a wonderful new resource, released just over six months ago, and it's quite a genealogical rabbit hole. Some Canadian records have recently been added and among several other deeds naming Stephen Pyle, I found one from 1796 in which my fourth great-grandfather, Moses Hull, sold land to his future son-in-law, my third great-grandfather, Stephen Pyle.
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| From Guysborough Land Records. 1810-1818 (though many are from the 1780s and 1790s). |