Charles Edward Stewart

Grandpa Charlie, a photo by midgefrazel on Flickr.

At archive.org, I located a badly digitized copy of The Genealogical and Biographical Record of New London County Connecicut. Published in Chicago by J. H. Beers & Co. in 1905. You can see how faint the printing is.

I found out about it from a footnote in a paper written about my Scholfield family that was shared with me quite some time ago by another researcher.

Unfortunately, the pages I needed weren't there! After an appeal on Facebook and Twitter, my friend Dorothy who works at the Mystic River Historical Society in Mystic offered to photocopy the missing pages and mail them to me. The information in those pages matched with what I previously researched. (always a good thing!)

Yesterday, I decided to find out exactly what was in this out-of-copyright book and I discovered (again) that the list of people and families in the book is in at index early in the book.

I have printed the first few pages to study while I look at TV in the evening. But, while they were printing, I started at the back and looked at the last 15 or 20 pages. Much to my surprise, my great-grandfather, Charles Edward Stewart, was one of those whose biography appears.

The clipping here is just part of the information that was given. I did clip the whole section for my notebook. 

The listing of his ancestors (and mine) would have been very useful to me in 1999 when I started researching back further. It is obvious that the information was taken from R.A. Wheeler's History of Stonington. The wording is very much the same. I don't imagine they worried about plagiarism in those days! 


It suddenly dawned on me that my great grandfather must have known about the first part with the ancestors (and given) the information in the clip above. Some of this is in his obituary and some is new information!


Isn't it fun when you get new information? It has really inspired me to dig deeper and finish my investigation of the Stewart Hill Cemetery and the obituaries of those people.