Forgotten New England

Ryan W. Owen, Writer and Photographer

Other People’s Ancestors – How House Histories Bring the Unrelated Together

October 22, 2011.Reading time 14 minutes.

When I started researching my family tree in 1988, the hobby was quite solitary. I spent hours in the local history room of the Pollard Memorial Library in Lowell, Massachusetts, threading microfilm reels of the local papers through the microfilm readers and leafing through dusty, yellowed City Directories. I remember the excitement of the first time […]

The Value of Living Memories, Lowell, MA: Circa 1865

October 17, 2011.Reading time 8 minutes.

For those of us born into Generation X, the earliest living memory of a family member we’ve likely been exposed to might stretch as far back as Prohibition, or the Great War, or maybe, for the older members of our generation, childhood memories of the Spanish-American War. I write a local history column for the […]