Mysterious family and place names

When you start doing family history, sooner or later you come across mysterious names that crop up among family members, and you wonder where they came from and what their significance is.
Barlow-Jones
I was reminded of this when someone asked on the South African genealogy mailing list about the name Barlow-Jones.
I’m researching a family JONES who [...]

Dead at my age

Some trivia, for those who are interested – Dead at your age tells you who died at your age, and who you’ve outlived. Not everyone, of course, just the famous and notorious.
You are 67 years and 346 days old today.At your exact age, Irving Babbitt died. He was a foremost proponent of the early 20th-century [...]

It’s hip to be classical

The Mark Growden sextet have teamed with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestrato provide a nightclub after the concert, according to the Contra Costa Times:
S.F. Symphony is deeply involved in a new initiative called Davies After Hours. It launches March 20, right after the last strains of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony die away in the concert hall. [...]

Red Cross records — will they be made available?

Genealogy research textbooks have sometimes mentioned the Red Cross records in Geneva, but usually with the caution that though they could have a lot of important family history information, the public was not allowed access to them.
Now, it seems, there has been a breach in the dyke, and a historian has been allowed to use [...]

Interesting children

Denis Ahern does a service to genealogists by transcribing interesting articles and announcements from old newspapers, which he posts in soc.genealogy.ireland and soc.genealogy.britain.
On 17 June 2003 he posted this exerpt from the Cork Examiner:
DEATHS.
On Friday morning, at Prospect hill, Limerick, after a short illness, of diptheria, aged three years and even months, Emma Jane, fifth [...]

Brathwaite family

One of the families that we haven’t researched for some time is the Brathwaite family of New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.
The outline of the family history was given to us 20 years ago by Errol Lister Brathwaite of New Zealand.
Caroline Agnes Wilson was the eldest daughter of Margaret Ann Agnes Green (known as Agnes) [...]