The Fellows of the American Society of Genealogists held their annual meeting on Saturday, October 15, 2022. Priscilla Eaton Gumina of Rochester, New York, was elected to the Society as its 172nd Fellow.

For more than twenty years, Priscilla Eaton Gumina has published extensively and frequently, principally on Maine families, in the leading genealogical journals. In 2020, her magisterial two-volume work, The Littlefield Genealogy: Descendants of Edmund Littlefield of Wells, Maine, received the Donald Lines Jacobus Award. As a researcher and writer, she deftly solves knotty problems ranging from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Moreover, she sets these genealogical analyses compellingly into well narrated historical and cultural contexts. Her genealogical writing is a joy to read.

The fourth and final $2500 ASG Continuing Research grant for 2022 has been awarded to Holly MacCammon of Philmont, New York, for her project to index New York surrogate court guardianship records 1802 to 1866 abstracted and serialized in The Columbia newspaper between 1985 and 1992 as a first step to establishing intellectual and physical arrangement of disorganized records haphazardly arranged in several microfilm collections: 1890–1899, digitized and indexed at Ancestry; 1881–1889, not digitized; and 1802–1880, digitized but not indexed at FamilySearch.

Ms. MacCammon is the sole proprietor of HollyGenealogy, LLC, specializing in New England and New York State research.  Previously she has worked as Senior Project Manager for World Monuments Fund, New York, N.Y., and as a New York City Regional Archivist, Documentary Heritage Program, for the New York State Archives and Records Administration, Albany, N.Y. She earned a Professional Learning Certificate in Genealogical Research from Boston University.

The Society will make its decision on grant opportunities for 2023 at the annual meeting in October, with announcements concerning eligibility and application process to be distributed shortly thereafter. Further information about this new grant program is available elsewhere on the website of the American Society of Genealogists. Additional information is available from Alicia Crane Williams, Chair, ASG Grant Committee (4 White Trellis, Plymouth MA 02360; or acwcrane@aol.com).

Clarence Almon Torrey, FASG (1869-1962), is the 2022 inductee into the National Genealogy Hall of Fame. He was nominated for this honor by the American Society of Genealogists, and the announcement was made at NGS’s 2022 Family History Conference dinner held in Sacramento, California, on May 27, 2022.

A native of Manchester, Iowa, Torrey was educated at Cornell University and the University of Chicago. He then worked as a librarian for the University of Chicago for a few years before relocating to Massachusetts in 1921, from which point he dedicated himself wholly to genealogical research of New England families. Torrey was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists in 1942 as number 22 on the roll.

Mr. Torrey’s reputation as one of the giants in the pantheon of genealogy rests on his magnum opus: “New England Marriages Prior to 1700,” a twelve-volume manuscript (of which the original is held at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston) that he compiled and annotated throughout his 41-year genealogical career. It lists approximately 37,000 New England couples whose marriages occurred prior to 1700, drawn from many thousands of references from printed sources. It was first published (without the references) in 1985, and has gone through many printings. It was released on CD-ROM, with the references, in 2001, and finally in book form, complete with the copious references, in 2011. Sixty years after Torrey’s death, his monumental index remains an indispensable bibliographical and demographic resource for anyone researching New England colonial families.

In addition to his compilation of colonial couples, Mr. Torrey published over fifty articles, nearly all in The American Genealogist. He specialized in uncovering English origins and identifying the maiden names of the wives of early New England and Long Island colonists. He was a careful, meticulous researcher. His long and extensive labors in the field of New England genealogy made him a kind of “elder statesman” to whom other genealogists could appeal for aid and counsel, according to his obituary written by his long-time genealogical colleague Donald Lines Jacobus in 1962. Torrey’s monumental compilation of New England marriages, as well as his individual studies of early colonial families and couples, continue to be cited regularly by scholars.

Clarence Almon Torrey, and all members of the National Genealogy Hall of Fame, are listed on the website of the National Genealogical Society.

Clarence Almon Torrey has been added to the list of Fellows named to the National Genealogical Society Hall of Fame.

Two new Continuing Research Grants ($2500 each) have recently been awarded by the American Society of Genealogists.

One grant was awarded to William E. Cole of Gold River, California, funding three projects: preparation of a compiled genealogy of The Wife of John Cole of Weedon Bec, Northamptonshire: Frances —, her siblings and parents; preparation of a compiled Cole genealogy expanding on “The English Origins of Job, John, Daniel and Ruth Cole,” published in Mayflower Descendant, vol. 69 (Winter 2021); and preparation of a narrative history of the trials and tribulations faced by nine Puritans for their non-conformist beliefs in the early 1590s within the Church of England and in England’s highest courts. Mr. Cole is an in-demand genealogy presenter who will be speaking at the National Genealogical Society Family History Conference, “The American Mosaic,” in Sacramento, May 24-28, 2022.

A grant was also awarded to Al Sharp of Kittitas, Washington, to continue his “Henrico Project” of systematic abstracts from the Henrico County, Virginia, court records, of which fourteen volumes have already been published. This grant will be applied towards the completion of two volumes of Court Minute Books, 1752–1755 and 1755–1762. Mr. Sharp has worked with the editors of the papers of George Washington and James Madison at the University of Virginia in an Early American Studies seminar, critiquing draft theses of graduate students. He was also instrumental in obtaining changes in the Virginia laws to allow digital access to Virginia court records.

Further information about this new grant program is available on the website of the American Society of Genealogists. Additional information is available from Alicia Crane Williams, Chair, ASG Grant Committee (4 White Trellis, Plymouth MA 02360; or acwcrane@aol.com).

Ian Watson of Burtenbach, Germany, has been awarded the first ASG Continuing Research Project Grant of $2500 for his work to bring transcriptions of Ipswich Deeds to public researchers.

Ipswich Deeds are the five volumes of land records kept at the northern Essex County registry from roughly 1640 to 1710. In their early years these volumes also contain registered wills, inventories, and court records. They are an important source on the early settlers of Ipswich, Newbury, Rowley, and nearby towns. The originals are at the Southern Essex Registry of Deeds in Salem, along with manuscript copies of volumes 1-3 which were made in the 1800s. FamilySearch has digitized microfilm of the manuscript copies of volumes 1-3 and the originals of volumes 4-5 (https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/74273). Building on the work of ASG Fellows George Freeman Sanborn Jr. and Jane Fletcher Fiske, who transcribed and initially indexed the first two volumes of Ipswich Deeds, Watson is updating the archaic media on which the transcriptions have been stored, converting from an obsolete text program to modern LaTeX files, and formatting and re-indexing the results for publication.

Ian Watson is author of the forthcoming Volume I of Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1636-1638, covering surnames beginning with A through Be. He is co-author with Kyle Hurst of Selected Ancestors of Nelson McMahon and Louise Rathbun published by Newbury Street Press in 2020, and he is a paid proofreader for the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly and the APG eNews. He preserved and reposted the Pruzhany Uyezd Research Society’s website at www.pruzh.org, which preserves material about the Pruzhany district Jewish diaspora. Watson’s most recent genealogical article is “The Dating of the Providence Civil Compact,” published in The American Genealogist, 91(2019-2020):165-189, 261-283.

For more information about the Grant Program and application forms, e-mail acwcrane@aol.com or write to Alicia Crane Williams, FASG, Chair, ASG Grant Committee, 4 White Trellis, Plymouth MA 02360

The Fellows of the American Society of Genealogists are pleased to announce a new grant opportunity in support of important continuing genealogical research projects. These grants are intended to assist with those projects sitting unfinished (or unstarted) on every genealogist’s “back burner” for lack of financial aid to help cover researching and writing time, costs of copies, fees, travel, and other usual expenses associated with genealogical research and publication.

Each grant is for $2,500. Projects are not limited regarding subject, length, or format, but the value of the work to other researchers and institutions will be an important consideration. Examples of possible projects include, but are not limited to, compilation of single or extended family genealogies, transcriptions or translations of original documents, bibliographies, indexes, studies of ethnic groups, geographic locations, migration patterns, legal history, etc., using genealogical resources and methods.

Publication is not required, but acknowledgement of the support from the American Society of Genealogists in any distribution of the project results is requisite.

Fellows of the American Society of Genealogists are not eligible for these grants.

A detailed grant description document is available here.

Further information and application form are available from Alicia Crane Williams, FASG, 4 White Trellis, Plymouth, MA 02360; acwcrane@aol.com.

The Society’s 82nd Annual Meeting was held entirely by videoconference on Saturday, October 9, 2021.  Of the 36 Fellows in attendance, 33 are visible in this image:

Row 1: Joslyn, Taylor, Remington, Bamberg, C. Hansen.
Row 2: J. Anderson, R. Anderson, Rose, Dwyer, H. Jones.
Row 3: Baldwin, Smith, Hoff, J. Hansen, Sanborn.
Row 4: Stott, Dearborn, Hinchliff, Harris, Dobson.
Row 5: Saxbe, Mills, W. Fiske and J. Fiske, Hatcher, Byrne.
Row 6: Williams, T. Jones, Hart, Murphy, Mathews.
Row 7: Hill, Lennon.
Present but not visible in photo: Hyde, Mahler, Sperry.

John Frederick Dorman, CG (Emeritus), FASG, FNGS, FVGS, 73rd Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists and for many years our senior living fellow, died today, 26 November 2021, at The Woodmont Center in Fredericksburg, Virginia, after a long illness.

Fred was born in Louisville, Kentucky, 25 July 1928, the only child of John Frederick and Sue Carpenter (Miller) Dorman. His father was the child of German immigrants; his mother was descended from colonists in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania who had migrated to Kentucky at the end of the eighteenth century. It was through this maternal ancestry that Fred developed the interest in Virginia genealogy that defined his career. Fred received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville in 1950. He served from 1951 to 1953 in the United States Army’s Army Security Agency, the successor to the SSA (Signals Security Agency), which conducted military signals intelligence in the Second World War. He then served as assistant archivist at the College of William and Mary from 1953 to 1955,  simultaneously earning a M.A. in library science from Emory University in 1955. In the following year he moved to Washington, D.C., and became an independent professional genealogist.

Fred’s first genealogical article was published in Louisville in 1949, while he was still an undergraduate (“Descendants of General Jonathan Clark, Jefferson County, Kentucky, 1750-1811,” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 23 [1949], nos. 1, 2, and 4). This launched a publication career that few, if any, will ever match. Aside from several comprehensive book-length genealogies of colonial Virginia families (Robertson, 1964; Farish, 1967; Preston, 1982; Epes, 1992-1999; Claiborne, 1995; and most recently Slaughter, still unfinished), he published a long list of articles in National Genealogical Society Quarterly, The American Genealogist, and other leading journals. He also published, as editor or co-editor, dozens of volumes of abstracts of Virginia county records and Revolutionary War pension applications. He edited the major reprint sets of Genealogies of Virginia Families from Tyler’s Quarterly, William and Mary Quarterly, and The Magazine of Virginia Genealogy published by Genealogical Publishing Company in the 1980s. In the 1980s, he co-edited the third edition of Adventurers of Purse and Person—the systematic genealogical summary of all Virginia settlers before 1625 who left descendants—and then went on to produce the substantially enlarged fourth edition, in three volumes in 2007. Throughout all this, Fred launched and sustained The Virginia Genealogist, which he published in 200 issues over fifty years from 1957 to 2006.

Fred was deeply involved in the leading educational and professional organizations of the genealogical world. He served the National Genealogical Society as its librarian in 1959-1960 and vice president in 1958-59 and 1968-70, and a councilor in the 1950s and again in the 1970s. He was one of the founding board members of the Board for Certification of Genealogists in 1964, and after many years as a trustee, served as its president in 1979-80 and executive director from 1982 to 1996. Fred was only thirty when he was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists in 1958; he was its treasurer from 1959 to 1966 and served as president from 1982 to 1985. He taught for many sessions of the National Institute of Genealogical Research (now Gen-Fed) in Washington, D.C., and the Institute of Genealogical and Historical Research at Samford University, Birmingham, Ala.  Beyond these involvements, Fred saw participation and membership in hereditary societies as entirely consistent with the scholarly pursuit of genealogy. He was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of Virginia, Sons of the American Revolution, Sons of the Revolution, Society of Colonial Wars, General Society of the War of 1812, Jamestowne Society, Descendants of Colonial Governors, and other hereditary societies. He served some of these in a volunteer capacity as a state- or national-level officer; he also served others professionally as the verifying genealogist.

In recent years, Fred was limited by frailty mostly to his home and then to assisted living and nursing facilities in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Even when he could no longer continue sustained research and writing, Fred retained a prodigious memory for genealogical detail as well as a gracious and humble demeanor. He delighted the Fellows by attending the American Society of Genealogists’ annual meeting in Richmond in 2018, sixty years after his election.

The ASG Scholar Award rewards talented genealogists with stipends to pursue advanced academic training in genealogy. At its annual meeting on October 9, 2021, the American Society of Genealogists granted the ASG Scholar Award for 2022 to Michael G. Hait Jr., CG, CGL, of Harrington, Delaware, for his unpublished work, “African American Families Enslaved by the Carrolls of Maryland.” Mr. Hait will use the award to attend the Genealogical Institute of Federal Records (Gen-Fed) in 2022.

We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of our 150th Fellow, Helen Schatvet Ullmann of Acton, Massachusetts. Helen died on Saturday, 9 October 2021—the day of our 82nd Annual Meeting—at the age of 83. Beyond her service to the field for many years as the Associate Editor of The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Helen is personally known and remembered by countless genealogists as a selfless and gracious colleague, and a tenacious and perceptive researcher.