Another Good Reason to be in Boston

In addition to the Boston University, Certificate Program in Genealogical Research, here's another great reason to appreciate living near Boston. The Boston Early American History Seminar is open to the public and free (unless you pay the reasonable fee of $25 to receive advance copies of the papers to be discussed and to support the buffet supper served after meetings). This forum for early American history has several sessions of particular interest to genealogists. Also notable is the interest of these professors in both history and genealogy.

6 December 2011, 5:15 p.m.
Abigail Chandler, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and Ruth Wallis Herndon, Bowling Green State University
Panel Discussion on Colonial Family Law
Comment: Cornelia Hughes Dayton, University of Connecticut

Chandler's faculty page has bare details, but her thesis is online and looks very interesting:

• "At The Magistrate's Discretion: Sexual Crime And New England Law, 1637-1718"

Herndon's faculty page lists several interesting books and projects:

• Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001)
• Children Bound to Labor: Pauper Apprenticeship in Early America (Cornell University Press, 2009), co-edited with John E. Murray
• "collaborating with Dr. Ella Wilcox Sekatau, medicine woman, ethnohistorian and genealogist of the Narragansett Tribe, on a project to re-tell New England history using both Euro-American and Narragansett sources"
• "Children of Misfortune: The Fates of Boston’s Poor Apprentices," a study that traces the lives of children bound out from the Boston almshouse in the eighteenth century

6 March 2012, 5:15 p.m.
Karin Wulf, College of William and Mary
Ancestry as Social Practice in Eighteenth-Century New England: The Origins of Early Republic Genealogical Vogue
Comment: Laurel Ulrich, Harvard University

Wulf's faculty page lists several interesting books and projects:

• Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America (Penn State, 1997), with Catherine Blecki
• The Diary of Hannah Callender, 1758-1788 (forthcoming), with Susan Klepp
• Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Cornell University Press, 2000)
• a study of the relationship between genealogical practices and political culture: “Lineage: The Politics and Poetics of Genealogy in British America, 1680-1820”

Thanks to Legal History Blog for a heads up on the seminar

© 2011, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved