Massachusetts Town Survey Reports
Useful information when researching town history in Mass.
- - By Nancy Lecompte
- Each report evaluates the town’s existing historic properties inventory, highlights significant historic buildings and settlement patterns, and presents threats to these resources. A bibliography lists key secondary resources.
R U Calling My Nana a Liar? - Barking Up the Wrong Tree:
- We tell them that those stories are not fact until we have the records to back them up.
- It's only natural that we believe what our mother, father, or any other family elder for that matter, tells us about our family history. Unfortunately some of their stories get distorted over time.
- Now imagine that game of telephone is happening, not over an hour but, over decades. Oh, and someone in the "telephone" line was 8 years old when it was their turn and they only heard the story the one time. Your Nana may have had the best of intentions in passing the story along to you. She probably believed every word of it but if you base your research on that and toss aside any records that don't fit the family legend your real family history will never be found.
- Your ancestor had "high cheek bones" or "long, straight black hair", fact. Saying that the trait denotes a certain ethnicity or race is conjecture, speculation, or wishful thinking, not fact.
- A grandparent could have told a fictional story to their grandchild at an impressionable age. That child then tells it to his own children and so on. Somewhere along the way it becomes, not a bedtime story but a family story. When did the story change from fiction to non-fiction?
- Once you start researching you may find that a small part of the story IS true. Over the years it's just been embellished a little.
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He’s baaaack ---