19 April 1775

Written by Merrill, a Colonel of militia, sending an account of the American militia’s opposition to British troops at Lexington and Concord to Captain Currier. Mentions that Gage marched last evening out of Boston "Destroying our men and interest." Tells Currier to muster and mobilize as many of his officers and soldiers as possible. Tells him to spread the word and have other militia companies join them. Says he should appoint an officer to take charge in case he has to leave. Merrill still saw himself as a British citizen when he signed the date of the letter "in the Fifteenth Year of the Reign of George the Third."

In February 1775, Parliament declared Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion. This declaration permitted soldiers to shoot suspected rebels on sight. In April, General Thomas Gage (1721-1787) received secret orders to arrest the ringleaders of colonial unrest. Having already learned of the orders, colonial leaders fled Boston to avoid arrest. Gage decided to seize and destroy arms the patriots had stored at Concord, 20 miles northwest of Boston. On the night of April 18, 1775, 700 British soldiers began to march toward Concord. When Joseph Warren (1741-1775), a Boston patriot, discovered that British troops were on the march, he sent Paul Revere (1735-1818) and William Dawes (1745-1799) to ride to Concord to warn the people about the approaching forces. At dawn on April 19, the troops reached the town of Lexington, five miles east of Concord. About seventy volunteer soldiers called minutemen lined the Lexington Green to warn the red-coated British troops not to trespass not he property of freeborn English subjects. A shot rang out; the British troops fired. Eight minutemen were killed and another ten were wounded. The British continued to Concord, where they searched for hidden arms. At North Bridge, a group of redcoats and minutemen clashed, leaving 3 redcoats and 2 minutemen dead. The British then retreated to Boston, while citizen-soldiers fired at the soldiers from behind trees and stone fences. British solders killed or wounded totaled 273; colonists losses were 95. The resistance displayed on April 19, 1775 indicated that the American Revolution would truly be a popular revolution. The battles of Lexington and Concord occurred three weeks after Patrick Henry (1736-1799) delivered his famous words, "Give me liberty or give me death." Although an earlier battle with the British had been fought in North Carolina, at Moore’s Creek Bridge, Lexington and Concord became fixed in the public mind as the valiant start of American resistance. Several first-person accounts of these battles survive. Phineas Fullam, a Committee of Safety post rider, reported seeing "some of the Men killed the whole number on both sides as near as can be estimated is 200 among whom are a Considerable Number of Regular Officers." Colonel Isaac Merrill, who mobilized the Amesbury militia, offers the description of one of the Revolution’s opening clashes.]]> http://www.massar.org/features/the-massachusetts-rebellion-at-lexington-and-concord/feed/ 0 http://www.massar.org/news/renowned-expert-to-speak-at-sundays-patriots-day-luncheon/ http://www.massar.org/news/renowned-expert-to-speak-at-sundays-patriots-day-luncheon/#comments Sun, 01 Apr 2012 22:42:47 +0000 admin http://www.massar.org/?p=1638 [continue reading...]]]> "The Last Muster: Images of the Revolutionary War Generation"

By Alexandra Alter
Wall Street Journal

Internationally-known genealogical photo expert Maureen Taylor is to speak at our Patriot's Day Banquet on Sunday, April 15th, at the Colonial Inn in Concord. Please make your reservation on line or download a registration form here. Anyone interested in scheduling a consultation with Maureen Taylor on Sunday is welcome to contact her through her website. We look forward to seeing you!

Maureen Taylor has dated a photograph to 1913 by studying the size and shape of a Lion touring car's headlamps. Armed with her collection of 19th-century fashion magazines, she can pinpoint the brief period when Victorian women wore their bangs in tight curls rather than swept back. Using a technique borrowed from the CIA, she identified a photo of Jesse James by examining the shape of his right ear.

With millions of Americans obsessively tracing their roots, Ms. Taylor has emerged as the nation's foremost historical photo detective. During a recent meeting of the Maine Genealogical Society, attendees lined up a dozen deep as she handled their images with a cotton glove and peered at the details through a photographer's loupe. One man offered a portrait photo and asked if it could be of his great grandmother, who died in 1890. "It's not," Ms. Taylor said after about 15 seconds; she'd dated the hairstyle and billowy blouse to the early 20th century. When another attendee asked why her great-great-grandfather was wearing small hoops in his ears in a portrait, Ms. Taylor explained, "He was in the maritime trade."

Each day, millions of people visit genealogy Internet sites such as Ancestry.com, which now has 15 million users, and has seen sales balloon to $151 million last year, three times the 2002 total. Ms. Taylor and a handful of other detectives are filling a growing niche in the genealogy business: dating and identifying the subjects of photographs.

Since she launched her business 10 years ago, Ms. Taylor says, she's tackled some 10,000 photo puzzles. Working out of a cluttered office in her Westwood, Mass., home, she receives about 30 requests each week, up from five a decade ago. She is sought out by collectors, historians and even TV producers to weigh in on controversies. Her current preoccupation: finding lost or unidentified photos of people who lived during the Revolutionary War.

The Story Behind the Photo

Civil War soldier or hunter? Click the photo to see the clues Ms. Taylor used to topple one family's lore.

Ms. Taylor, who charges $60 an hour, has learned to spot details that reveal not only a photo's period, but the story behind it. A broom at the feet of a couple in a mid-19th-century portrait, for instance, often marks it as a wedding picture. A photograph of a baby in a carriage from the 1860s might not be a birth announcement, but a death card; in that period of high infant mortality, dead infants were commonly photographed in carriages. A 19th-century woman with unusually short hair may have had scarlet fever, because it was common to shave a victim's head.

The most satisfying cases, Ms. Taylor says, are those that reunite people with lost pieces of their past.

When her 85-year-old mother moved into a nursing home, Cassie Horner, a 50-year-old free-lance writer in Plymouth, Vt., inherited more than 100 photographs, most of which were unidentified. In February, Ms. Horner and a cousin hired Ms. Taylor to analyze the images, especially a tintype of two women and a baby. Ms. Taylor dated the photo within two years of its creation, just by flipping it over; she recognized a Civil War tax stamp that was used from Aug. 1, 1864, to Aug. 1, 1866. With that time period, the cousins determined one woman was their great-grandmother, Myalina Gage, the eldest of 13 children, with her younger sister Malinda. The baby was likely one of Myalina's children who died.

For years, Brad Leonard of Missoula, Mont., puzzled over the contents of an album he believed had belonged to his great-grandmother. So in January, he sent more than 50 images to Ms. Taylor. She spent four months researching Rhode Island photo studios, studying the family tree and comparing facial features. Eventually, she identified 25 of Mr. Leonard's ancestors in images she dated from 1860 to 1900. She said one was of his great-grandfather John, whose picture he had never seen. In one portrait, John Leonard leans jauntily on an ornamental column, wearing a bowler and a stylish pinstriped suit. It was strange, Mr. Leonard says, to see his own long, straight nose and deep-set eyes looking back at him. "Sometimes I think it would be nice if we could have a cocktail party and all meet," he says of his ancestors.

Ms. Taylor says her job is more of a passion than a lucrative enterprise. As a child in Bristol, R.I., she occupied herself on snowy days by studying old family photos from her mother's closet. After earning a history degree in 1978, she joined the Rhode Island Historical Society, where she worked as an assistant photo curator and genealogical researcher. To augment her $6,000 salary, she took up a paper route. In the mornings, she worked on genealogy, poring over family records and church rosters. Afternoons were devoted to studying nuances of old photos like tintypes (they're made of iron, so magnets will stick to them) and daguerreotypes (they have reflective surfaces like mirrors). When the photos are well preserved, she says, "the people look like they're so real they could step out of the frame."

Maureen Taylor in her office.

There are currently about half a dozen family historians who specialize in dating images by clothing, photographic style or props. Some are using scientific methods to date photos, rather than focusing on details like clothing. Colleen Fitzpatrick, an optical scientist and genealogist who also studies handwriting, tries to answer questions about photographs by measuring shadows -- which might hint at what time of day they were taken -- or by measuring the dimensions of photos to determine what kind of camera was used. Kathleen Hinckley, executive director of the Association of Professional Genealogists, says Ms. Taylor has risen to the top of the field by bridging the disciplines of genealogy, art history, costume history and cultural anthropology.

The first popular photographs, daguerreotypes, appeared in France and England in the 1830s. These small, reflective, metal images typically have protective cases and can last hundreds of years. The medium proved immensely popular. By the 1850s, studios made ambrotypes, images captured on glass with a mixture of ether and gun cotton; tintypes, photos made by coating iron plates with light-sensitive chemicals; and card photographs, prints mounted on cardboard. When candid photography arrived in 1889 with the invention of the Kodak snapshot, family collections swelled with shots of christenings, birthdays and everyday scenes. Problematically, few people thought to label them.

Today, old photographs sit in attics or unlabeled boxes at antiques fairs and thrift shops, or drift unclaimed on eBay. Some Web sites hawk unidentified portraits, branding them "instant ancestors," while others specialize in reuniting orphaned photos with their families. One site, deadfred.com, has a database with more than 70,000 abandoned photos dating back as far as 1840; more than 1,100 have been claimed.

One client of Ms. Taylor's, a New York artist, asked her to determine whether one of the four men in an 1874 photo was Jesse James. Using a technique she'd found in a book by a former CIA analyst, Ms. Taylor studied the shape of the man's right ear and compared it to photos known to be of James. A bump on the man's helix, combined with a receding hairline and narrow jaw, identified him as the infamous outlaw.

On a typical morning, Ms. Taylor is at her desk by 8, scanning photos uploaded to her Web site or submitted by email. She often prints 20 or so and tacks them on her bulletin board to mull over. Sometimes, they stare back at her for months. One troublesome photograph, of a woman in a dress whose style was difficult to date, stayed on her board for a year before Ms. Taylor hit upon the answer. The woman, who was likely poor, had resewn the dress several times.

Ms. Taylor is a compulsive collector of obscure reference books (one of her prize finds was an 1884 geographical dictionary called the Lippincott Gazetteer of the World), and has floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with guides to gravestone markers, buttons, shoes, Victorian costumes, encyclopedias of United States Army uniforms, quilt-pattern catalogs, encyclopedias of paper products, fabric swatches, stamp books, a manual on the symbolism of fraternal organizations and a guide to photo fakery written by a former official at the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center.

After Ms. Taylor dated an unknown photo as 1900-1910, Rita Werner of Taylorville, Ill., was able to identify the women as (from left) her great-grandmother, her great-aunt and her great-grandmother's sister.

She's constantly scavenging for old photographs, and has amassed an entire closet full of antique photos from flea markets, antique fairs and online auction sites. Among them is a cardboard box of 19th-century family portraits that she bought two years ago at an antiques fair in Brimfield, Mass. Each photograph is labeled according to the person's relationship to a mystery woman named Louise. "I haven't gotten to it yet," says Ms. Taylor, who's tall and slim with icy blue eyes. "I still have to find Louise."

When an answer can't be found in one of her books or in images she's already identified and dated, she hunts down other experts to learn about horticulture, medical photography or 19th-century weapons.

Sometimes, her conclusions topple well-established family lore.

Marjorie Osterhout, 46, a free-lance writer in Seattle, was fairly certain she'd found a photo of a relative who'd served in the Civil War (see image). The thin, stern-looking gentleman wears an ammunition belt and poses with a rifle and a black dog at his feet. She learned she had a tintype, a cheap, durable photograph Civil War soldiers often mailed home to relatives.

In June, she submitted the image to Ms. Taylor to test the theory, and an answer arrived three days later. The photograph did fit the Civil War period, but the man's high-crowned leather cap differed from the uniform caps soldiers wore. His strange, lace-up shirt wasn't part of a military uniform or even a work shirt. A military expert helped Ms. Taylor determine that the gun, which appears to be an 1866-model Winchester repeating rifle, was not military-issue. Looking beyond the soldiers in her family, Ms. Osterhout found a match: Samuel Downs of Vineland, N.J., a blacksmith who, for reasons that remain unknown, did not serve in the Civil War despite being the right age. Mr. Downs might have been posing in his hunting gear. "I didn't know we had a hunter in the family," Ms. Osterhout says.

Revolutionary War

Ms. Taylor gives about 20 lectures a year, has a column in Family Tree Magazine and writes books, including "Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs" (2005). Her latest quest may well be her most ambitious. Using census records, Ms. Taylor and a colleague, David Lambert, are tracking down photos of Revolutionary War veterans who lived to see the photography era in the late 1830s. So far, the researchers have found 100 images. They've also found photos of Revolutionary War families, including widows, by searching public and private collections for 1840s-era photographs of elderly people.

"We're looking for pictures people don't know they have," says Ms. Taylor, who's working on a book about the topic. "The majority of photographs from that period are still unidentified. They're lost."

Write to Alexandra Alter at alexandra.alter@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2007, page W1

The 1940 census will be released online on April 2, 2012! Beginning tomorrow, you will be able to access the digitized census records at http://1940census.archives.gov.. The digital images will be accessible free of charge at NARA facilities nationwide through our public access computers as well as on personal computers via the internet.

The 1940 census was taken on April 1, 1940. The official census population count was 132,164,569 for the United States proper but does not include the populations of the territories of the US. The census called for the street, avenue, road, and house number; the number of dwelling house and family in order of visitation; whether the home was owned or rented; the value of home, if owned, or monthly rental, if rented; whether the family lived on a farm; the name of each person whose usual place of residence on April 1, 1940 was with this family; the relationship of this person to the head of the family; each person’s sex; color or race; age at last birthday; marital condition; whether he or she attended school or college any time since March 1, 1940; highest grade of school completed; his or her place of birth; citizenship of the foreign-born; place of residence on April 1, 1935; his or her trade, profession, or particular kind of work done, and the industry of business with which he or she was involved, and his or her class of worker and number of weeks worked in 1939; wages or salary received in 1939 and whether or not $50 or more was earned from non-wage or non-salary sources; It also includes, if applicable, the number of the corresponding farm schedule.

Supplementary questions on sheet included name of the individual; place of birth of both parents; native language; if the person is a veteran or the wife, widow or minor child of a veteran; if a minor child, if their veteran father is dead; war or military service of veteran; if the person has a social security number; if old-age insurance or railroad retirement deductions were taken from their wages or salary in 1939 and if so, were they made from all, half or more, or less than half the wages or salary; his or her usual trade, profession, or particular kind of work done, and the usual industry of business with which he or she was involved, and his or her usual class of worker; for all women, whether they have been married more than once, age at first marriage and number of live births she has had.

Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online family history resource, also announced that both the images and indexes to the 1940 U.S. Federal Census will be made free to search, browse, and explore in the United States when this important collection commences streaming onto the website in mid-April 2012. Ancestry is committing to make the 1940 Census free from release through to the end of 2013, and by doing so hopes to help more people get started exploring their family history.

"The release of the 1940 U.S. Census will be an exciting event for any American interested in learning more about their family history," said Ancestry.com CEO Tim Sullivan. "By making this hugely important collection free to the public for an extended period, we hope to inspire a whole new generation of Americans to start researching their family history."

When complete, more than 3.8 million original document images containing 130 million plus records will be available to search by more than 45 fields. It will be Ancestry.com’s most comprehensively indexed set of historical records to date. As this census will be the most recent to be made publicly available, it represents the best chance for those new to family history to make that all-important first discovery.

For additional information on the 1940 census, see the 1940 Census Records website at http://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940. ]]> http://www.massar.org/news/1940-census-to-be-released-april-2nd-2012/feed/ 0 http://www.massar.org/leads/an-interview-with-compatriot-u-s-sen-roy-blunt/ http://www.massar.org/leads/an-interview-with-compatriot-u-s-sen-roy-blunt/#comments Sun, 25 Mar 2012 17:20:07 +0000 admin http://www.massar.org/?p=1611 [continue reading...]]]> By Timothy R. Bennett, Past Chairman
Congressional and Governmental Relations Committee

The ninth in a series of interviews with Congressional SAR members focused on Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo. Past Chairman of the Congressional andGovernmental Relations Committee Timothy R. Bennett and committee membersJ. Phillip London and recorder Andrew M. Johnson, both of the DCS SAR,interviewed Blunt in his office on Capitol Hill, while he was still a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He was elected to Congress in 1997, and elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010.

Mr. Blunt, why did you get interested in politics?

I have always been attracted to the idea of public service. Even for the four years of my adult life not spent in elected office, I was a president of a university, which has the same kind of satisfaction as part of that job every day. Just a few weeks ago, I decided that I would run for the Senate, which is at least a six-year commitment on my part. I went through the thought process of committing another six years to public service, and the truth is that I have always been highly rewarded and felt like I was doing something that mattered to the future of the country.

How was your experience as a university president and administrator helpful as majority whip in the U.S. House of Representatives?

For the four years before I came to the House, I was a university president at SouthwestBaptist University in Bolivar, Missouri. I have told a lot of people over the years that of all the great jobs I have had, that was actually the best one to prepare me to be the whip of the House.

Four years on a Christian college campus is a good experience whether you are the president of the college or a student there, and I benefited from that as a student a number of years earlier and as the president later.

Do you think the administration is proceeding in the best way to help the country recover from this economic downturn and also become more energy efficient?

I would strongly suggest that the times we are in now are not the times to make us less competitive or create a tax on energy. Cap-and-trade legislation would make us less competitive. I do think that we can move in the direction of using more American energy resources and less from foreign sources. In my view, that is what the Energy and Commerce Committee should be focusing on now. The whole concept of bailouts is troublesome to people whether they came from our early votes to give more money to agencies such as FNMA (Federal National MortgageAssociation) or FHLMC (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) or the money that went to automobile companies. It certainly doesn't seem to be producing the kind of results that taxpayers would want to see or that members of Congress would have hoped for. I was opposed to most of that legislation, although the September 2008 bill appeared at the time to be necessary to stabilize the economy. It did not do the job that the administration was telling us that it would do.

Please discuss the Combat Meth Act and Charitable Giving expansion and legislation.

These are a couple of pieces of legislation that I sponsored that became law. The CMA was designed to take the ingredients of methamphetamines off the shelf and put them under control.I was recently in a meeting with officials in Mexico where they tell me that Mexican meth immediately replaced our homemade meth. Missouri, like many other states, had a big problem with meth and this act helped a lot all over the country. The Mexican government, to their credit, also put the ingredients for meth under control.Now, I am told, meth costs twice as much as it did five or six years ago, a product of limiting the supply.That was a step in the right direction. TheCharitable Giving Act was an act to encourage people to give more money to church and charity through tax code encouragement. It produced good results, and I think we should be encouraging people to give more while the current administration’ stalking about limiting tax deductibility for charitable deductions. I am opposed to that. Charities do a better job with every dollar than the government does. Charity fundraising is very competitive and while not every dollar of giving is driven by the tax code, a significant number of donors are persuaded to donate on the basis of the tax code.

As a member of the SAR, what can we do to promote, educate and “grow” our organization so that we may be more effective?

I am pleased to be in the organization, and I have a number of ancestors who, I think, would have qualified me for membership. We used one of my relatives who was an Indian Scout, an Indian spy named Philip Highnote, and we were able to establish that genealogy. I am looking forward to seeing what the organization is doing. Certainly an important part of our heritage is the heritage of independence and the willingness of individuals to fight for that independence. As a former history teacher, it seems to me that our teaching of history has shifted away from the foundational document sand formative moments to those things we now wish to suggest were bigger than they were. Self government was a new idea. The idea of check sand balances, which we take totally for granted now, was a unique and new American idea.

The SAR supports many youth pro grams, which seek to help make youngAmericans more public service oriented.As a public servant, do you have any suggestions for these young people regarding opportunities and training for their adult lives?

In our country, public service needs to be an integral part of every citizen’s life. You don’t have to run for office and you don’t have to be a part of the government to be involved in public service.Participate as a voter, be active in your community, accept the responsibility of citizenship; all of these are key to public service. Democracy works best when everybody understands that they have an obligation to be part of democracy. Regarding public office, my advice would be to prepare yourself for the thing that you would rather do if public office did not work out. There is plenty of room in politics for doctors and engineers and farmers. You are much better at politics if you don’t feel that you have to have that elected job. The worst thing to do in politics is become dependent on the political office that you hold.

Are members of your family in the SAR, DAR or CAR?

My sons (except the one born in Russia, who is my adopted son) and my grandsons are all in the SAR and hopefully my daughter and my granddaughters will become members of the DAR..