RL Fifield vacuuming samplers with a dental vacuum in the old Textile Conservation Lab, MFA Boston, 2001. Back in the early aughts, I was a Collection Care Specialist in Textiles and Fashion Arts (TFA) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I was working on a National Endowment for the Arts grant to photograph and perform condition reports on 10,000 objects a part of their American collections. This work was undertaken in part to plan for a brand-new textile storeroom during the

Chester County Historical Society. In addition to Swarthmore College’s Friends Historical Library, Wednesday also took me to the Chester County Historical Society in West Chester, Pennsylvania. This is local history at its best – and very well-supported. CCHS has a complex in West Chester’s downtown. It combines a healthy amount of public programming space with permanent galleries for decorative arts and local history and space for special exhibitions. Silhouette of Ellis Cha

The stepped structure of the Maryland State Archives on Rowe Blvd, Annapolis. For a building built in 1984, I think the Maryland State Archives inspires. Maybe it strikes a chord with me akin to the library buildings of my childhood. Unlike it’s colonial and colonial revival ancestors further down Rowe Blvd in the heart of Annapolis, the building lacks quoins, pedimented doorways, and mullioned windows. After Registration, you enter the reference/research area, a vaulted spac

Ancestry.com, as a genealogical tool, is a start for many doing genealogy. I see it as a way to sketch and share only. There are a lot of problems with it, but it’s certainly quicker than cranking through all those census records on microfilm like we did in the past. It allows you to get through the basic stuff, and focus on the more difficult questions, and spend more time in the archives with wills, tax records, and the like. It’s also a sharing tool. A distant relative of

George Harrison Bowman, child of John Bowman and Ann Baker Both of my great great great grandparents died in 1857, leaving my fifteen year old great great grandfather  (at right) an orphan. Interestingly, he never appears in the census until after his marriage in 1880 when he was nearly forty years old. Where he lived and how he supported himself up until his service in the Civil War and before his marriage to Harriet Evans of Webster (outside Havre de Grace) has yet to be di

Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen (1873) has several recipes for fostering yeast from potatoes, including potato and hops mixtures, on page 231. One of the recipes indicates that one pound of it makes eighteen loaves of bread. Here is another recipe: Yeast with Potatoes Two medium-sized potatoes, boiled soft. When lukewarm, put them through a colander, and mix them with two table-spoons of flour, one table-spoon of brown or white sugar, and one and a half tea-spoonfuls of sal

In honor of Mom, here are photographs of my mothers, from my own mom, to a couple of my great great great grandmothers. Even if old photos survive, their identities can be lost. Here we have one mom (ha), two grandmothers, four great grandmothers, three great great grandmothers, and two great great great grandmothers. Take a picture of mom today. L to R, top to bottom: Winifred Cole Bayless (MD), Agnes Sybilla Anderson (PA), Agnes Irene Mobley (PA/MD), Adelaide Louise Cole (M

Click here for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Gibb Archaeological Consulting Crew, Cole Cemetery site, Aberdeen, MD, 2010. GAC photo. And then, my family members went on vacation. Like many families, they visited the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. But unlike your average Washington, D.C. tourist, the Coles stayed several months. Thanks to Doug Owsley, Forensic Anthropologist and member of the Department of Anthropology, I learned more about my ances

Click here for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Gibb Archaeological Consulting Crew, Cole Cemetery site, Aberdeen, MD, 2010. GAC photo. And then, my family members went on vacation. Like many families, they visited the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. But unlike your average Washington, D.C. tourist, the Coles stayed several months. Thanks to Doug Owsley, Forensic Anthropologist and member of the Department of Anthropology, I learned more about my ances

This post is a continuation of a series chronicling the relocation of my family cemetery, including my 4th Great Grandparents James Cole and Elizabeth Gilbert, in Aberdeen, Maryland in 2010. Click here to read Part I and Part II. Charles Darwin and his son, William. Today, many consider being inbred as more of a joke than a reality. It implies you grew up in the country, perhaps in often maligned West Virginia. But when families stay generation after generation in one area ou

This post is a continuation of a series chronicling the relocation of my family cemetery, including my 4th Great Grandparents James Cole and Elizabeth Gilbert, in Aberdeen, Maryland in 2010. Click here to read Part I and Part II. Charles Darwin and his son, William. Today, many consider being inbred as more of a joke than a reality. It implies you grew up in the country, perhaps in often maligned West Virginia. But when families stay generation after generation in one area ou

Click here for the first post on the Cole Cemetery relocation. My mother and I were standing in the Target parking lot in Aberdeen one cool and sunny Saturday morning in April 2010. We weren’t there to shop for hair dye. Instead, representatives of Merritt Properties LLC  led us down a steep embankment into the woods next door.  Tripping through winter-bare vines, we passed a worn campsite, indicated by charred earth and crushed tin cans. Alongside was a path through the wood

Click here for the first post on the Cole Cemetery relocation. My mother and I were standing in the Target parking lot in Aberdeen one cool and sunny Saturday morning in April 2010. We weren’t there to shop for hair dye. Instead, representatives of Merritt Properties LLC  led us down a steep embankment into the woods next door.  Tripping through winter-bare vines, we passed a worn campsite, indicated by charred earth and crushed tin cans. Alongside was a path through the wood

Baron Jean Louis Alibert performing the vaccination against smallpox in the Chateau of Liancourt, Constant Desbordes, c. 1820. Musee de la Chartreuses. The year is 2012. One of the greatest inventions to bolster human health – vaccinations – are a part of history. Scientists have spent over two hundred years creating vaccinations to prevent lethal and crippling diseases that threatened families, towns, countries, and continents. They are the reason we do not have to cross our

Baron Jean Louis Alibert performing the vaccination against smallpox in the Chateau of Liancourt, Constant Desbordes, c. 1820. Musee de la Chartreuses. The year is 2012. One of the greatest inventions to bolster human health – vaccinations – are a part of history. Scientists have spent over two hundred years creating vaccinations to prevent lethal and crippling diseases that threatened families, towns, countries, and continents. They are the reason we do not have to cross our

In April of 1940, there were just over 132 million Americans. Today, after the obligatory 72 year wait to protect the privacy of the living, the National Archives and Records Administration will open the records that documented the basic details of those people’s lives: the 1940 Census. Listen to the NPR program 1940 Census Release Is ‘Super Bowl for Genealogists.’ I’m looking forward to catching up with my family members in 1940. Here’s where I left them in the 1930 census.

Cole Family Burial Mound, Aberdeen, MD, 2010. The mound was left after gravel stripping operations in the 1940s, and has now been replaced by an office building. The tire tracks had been created by ATVs. Yes, literally. After the application of  trowels, sticks, and small brushes, out of the ground came the fragments of people with whom I share DNA. It’s a long story, so I’ll offer snippets of the story over a few non-consecutive posts. January 2010 began with a phone call fr

Barbara Fritchie Restaurant, Frederick MD, RL Fifield photo, 2009. Conjuring the appearance of a 17th or 18th century Still Room yields a beautiful bounty of preserved foods for the grimness of winter, as well titillating sweetmeats. Here, harvests of the better months are sugared and salted, turning them into something more robust and intense. Fruits suspended in sugar, candies, a good tonic for darkening hair, and many a stringent spiced pickle issued forth from the Still R