It's been raining for what feels like days here in the Lower Cape Fear. The gray winter skies opened up some time last week and it's still coming down -- a cold, bone-chilling rain that soaks you in a matter of minutes and sticks around as a damp ache in creaky joints no matter how …
Notes from a pandemic year
“Great fears of the Sicknesse here in the city, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. . . . God preserve us all,” wrote Samuel Pepys in 1665. The thirty-two-year-old British politician began keeping a daily record of the bubonic plague's ravaging of London that spring. His words feel a …
The Woman at the Window PART II
This post is part of series on recent family history research I've been working on and some of the methods that family historians and genealogists use. If you'd like to learn more about your own family history but don't know where to start, you can find out more here. In Part I of this story, …
The Woman at the Window PART I
This post is part of series on recent family history research I've been working on and some of the methods that family historians and genealogists use. If you'd like to learn more about your own family history but don't know where to start, you can find out more here. Bellevue Cemetery is situated on the …
Will you be my 18th century Valentine?
It's recently been estimated that Americans spend $19.5 billion on Valentine's Day. Whether you go all in or prefer to recast the holiday as "Singles Awareness Day," people have been baring their heart and soul through love notes for centuries. In early America, as long as quill, ink, and paper were on hand -- one …
