Thorough, Practical, and Refined
As I wrote in a recent post, my great-grandfather Frank Barnhart was an oil driller who worked the North Texas oil boom. At the time, my grandmother Dorothy Barnhart was 11 years old, ready to start 6th grade, and Frank and his wife felt that an oil boom town wasn’t the best place for her to get an education. They decided to send her to boarding school at Our Lady of Victory Academy, a Catholic girls’ school in Ft. Worth, Texas.
Declaring Independence
I was recently in Boston, Massachusetts, where I visited the Old State House, built in 1711 to hold the offices of the colonial governor and council. There I learned that the Declaration of Independence was read from the building’s balcony on July 18, 1776. The task of reading the Declaration fell to William Greenleaf, the sheriff of Suffolk County and my third cousin eight times removed. Unfortunately, William’s voice was quite weak so he was obliged to recruit the help of Thomas Crofts, who repeated each line after William read it.
The Dominion of New England
Growing up, one of my favorite books was The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. The novel, which won the Newbery Medal in 1959, tells the story of a young woman who, in 1687, comes to live with Puritan relatives in Wethersfield, Connecticut (Speare 1958). So I was delighted to discover relatives of mine among the founders of the earliest English settlements in Connecticut, including Wethersfield.
Lost on the Lady Elgin
On September 8, 1860, the steamship Lady Elgin, overloaded with passengers on a fundraising excursion, sank on Lake Michigan, an incident which remains the deadliest wreck on the open waters of the Great Lakes