Click here to check out Westport's great genealogy website. If you are researching Bristol County (which is next door to Plymouth County and Rhode Island) be sure to check Westport if your ancestors were from "Dartmouth." The Dartmouth of today is maybe a quarter of the Dartmouth of the late 17th & 18t century, as New Bedford, Fairhaven, Acushnet, and Westport struck out on their own after the Revolution. Transcriptions of Westport town meeting records have been online for several years but between the town and the Westport Historical Society they now have a mind-boggling array of digitized images of vital records, town meeting records, militia records, tax records, voters, road layouts, naturalization applications and lots more. I don't have many ancestors in Westport but it will still take me days to get through everything the Town of Westport's Historical Records and Oral Histories site has. Thank you, Westport!

Last week I attended an online NEHGS webinar called "The ABCs of Using School Records in Family History Research" and featuring David Allen Lambert, their senior genealogist. Although it was useful primarily to people living within the past 150 years, it had a lot of useful information. If you wanted to attend this or any other webinar, they are archived at NEHGS. Members and people logging on with the "free membership" (limited access) option can see it. As a thank you, participants who are not yet members were given a $20 dues discount by using the SUMMERGEN2020 discount code or logging on with this URL: https://my.americanancestors.org/donate/i/1?&promo=SummerGen2020

It's official! On Sep. 17th you can buy/order your Mayflower quadricentennial Forever stamps (55 cents, first class) at the Post Office or online at usps.com (then select "Postal Store" at the top, then "Stamps." ) You can see what the stamp will look like below, on the blogpost for June 1st.