Dear Susan, I must confess that I somehow stumbled onto this website ans am intrigued as to the interesting inquiries about peoples families and records research. I have especially had a wonderful time participating in the fun pronouncing names of towns and cities in our unique little dialects. People sure enjoy sharing their New Englandness with others. A great, lot of fun for all. Please tell me briefly, if you will, how this all works. I would like to learn more about my own family members, if at all possible. The Chetwynds, my father's family, go back to 1780's. They were from England and, as Loyalists, they left from New York for ( now called ) Shelburne, NS. On my mother's side, there are Donovans, Murphy's and , I believe, Kidney's, all from the county Cork area of Ireland. My G-G-GF, John Donovan, arrived in Boston in 1854. He was a blacksmith , who lived at West Cambridge ( now, Arlington ) and Charlestown, before removing to Quincy, where he first worked shoing horses for the, then new, Horse Street Railway. Later, he had his own stand at Neponset in Dorchester. How should I go about making my inquiries and to whom should they be directed ? Thankyou, Joe The Calker

Joe, Basically, you figure out which part of the family you want to start with first. Let's say you want to work on the Donovan family. I like to check the US Censuses to start. Once you find the family, you can get approximate ages, occupations, immigration dates, places of birth, and naturalization status. Many on this list have access to either www.ancestry.com and/or heritage quest through a public library. Additionally, most/all? local Family History Center have access to ancestry.com for free. You can find your local Family History Center at www.familysearch.com, look for Family History Centers on the second toolbar on the web page to find the ones nearest you and their location and hours of operation. These are at LDS Churches. All they ask is you sign in, so they can track usage. I'm not a LDS member and have found them very easy to deal with. Additionally, ancestry.com has some of the Boston City Directories on-line. There is a free-website, http://www.damrellsfire.com/cgi-bin/directory_search.pl , that has some from 1845 to 1875. Also, like myself, a number of the folks on this list have access to some of the directories on microfilm from the FHL and are willing to do lookups as time permits. I haven't used them, but the Boston Public Library can make copies of pertinent pages from the Boston City Directories and send them to you for a small fee. You have a couple of choices to look for birth, marriage, and death records. The FHL does have microfilms of both the City of Boston records and the Massachusetts Archives copies of those records. The database I've been referring to is the New England Historic Genealogical Society's website www.newenglandancestors.org . Like ancestry.com, most of the databases requires a paid subscription. In the NEHGS's case, it is currently $75 to use the on-line databases. Again, a number of folks on this and other Massachusetts county lists have access and are willing to do lookups. As many of the experienced researchers have pointed out to me, the Massachusetts Archives and the NEHGS database derived from those archives, are copies of the town records. If you were dealing with a small town, let's say Saugus, you are only looking at two microfilms that you can order from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah from your local Family History Center. The current cost of order a film at my local FHC is $5.50 to keep the film at the FHC for six weeks. Unfortunately, Boston requires a great many films, which is one of the reasons the NEHGS database is popular. The database is not complete. There are a number of image of registers loaded on the servers and not linked, meaning you can't click on them and see them. Additionally, there are a number of register images not yet loaded on the server. There is a problem with birth records for folks with a surname starting somewhere in the Ss and going though Zs in the 1886-1890 time frame. The indexes were not loaded and I don't know when they might be. There are some other problems, but the vast majority of images are available. The FHL also have probate records, with indexes and actual records available on microfilm I suggest you go to the "search the catalog" link on familysearch.org and use the "Place" search, type in Boston in Place and Massachusetts in (part of) and see what choices come up. Once you get the basic data on your family, you can write to the Catholic Cemetery Association and Archivist, Archdiocese of Boston for church records for your family, if you want more information like who were the sponsors and witnesses. I'm assuming those Donovans and Murphys were Catholic. If you find when your ancestors immigrated, both the FHL and ancestry.comhave ships manifests available, microfilm for the former and on-line database for the later. I have found some of my family, but not all. There are more choices for searching, which you will see from answers folks give questions on this list. I might suggest you start by asking for help from this list and once you know how involved you want to get consider a subscription to the NEHGS database. If you can't get easy access to your local FHC or access to Heritage Quest from a local library, you might want to consider ancestry.com. The NEHGS does have some information for New York, but as I have no family there, can't tell you how much. More and more of the Canadian information is coming on-line, free through http://automatedgenealogy.com/index.html and other sites, and paid through ancestry.com. I do suggest you check out the GenWeb project. Just type in the state or province and GenWeb in a search engine and you can find the area you are looking at. Most are broken out into the counties and towns. The GenWeb sites have links to helpful websites, might have databases of vital records on-line, could have cemetery listings, and just helpful information on your search. They vary in quality, but all the coordinators are doing the best they can, Let me know if you need more information. Do post with a new subject any request for your family and let us help you get started. Best of luck in your search. Sue Richart Chewelah, Washington State On 12/12/06, Joseph T Chetwynd wrote: > > > Please tell me briefly, if you will, how this all works. I would like to > learn more about my own family members, if at all possible. The > Chetwynds, my father's family, go back to 1780's. They were from England > and, as Loyalists, they left from New York for ( now called ) Shelburne, > NS. On my mother's side, there are Donovans, Murphy's and , I believe, > Kidney's, all from the county Cork area of Ireland. My G-G-GF, John > Donovan, arrived in Boston in 1854. > > How should I go about making my inquiries and to whom should they be > directed ? > > Thankyou, > > Joe The Calker > >