Volume 16 Issue 1, Spring 2009

Intersections of Common Interests and Collaboration

The last issue of this newsletter featured a brief biography of Melvin Hathaway Hapgood, the architect who designed the 1890 Simsbury Free Library building.  The connections between Architect Hapgood and members of the Eno family are worthy of mention. Library donor Amos Richards Eno’s  fourth son and youngest child, was only a few months older that the architect and over the years they developed a truly friendly working relationship.

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Volume 15  Issue 4,   Winter 2008-2009

The Architect Who Designed the Simsbury Free Library

A seventh generation descendant of Shadrach Hapgood who arrived in Massachusetts from England in 1656 at the age of fourteen, Melvin Hathaway Hapgood and his architectural firm designed several significant Simsbury buildings. Hapgood was born February 11, 1859, in a log cabin in the pioneer settlement of Minneapolis, Minnesota, where his parents had bought a forty-acre claim shortly after their marriage.

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Volume 15   Issue 3,  Fall 2008

Finding Ancestral Migrations In Federal Records

Unless you have a very unique pedigree, some of your ancestors moved somewhere at some point in time.  Rarely did all of our ancestors live their complete lives in one place. Where they went, how they got there, and why they moved can add flavor and depth to our research…

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Volume 15 Issue 2 Summer 2008

A Relic of an Eighteenth-Century Scourge

Many themes and mysteries surround the disappearance of the headstones from the East Granby Smallpox Cemetery on Hatchet Hill: in the 18th century, a dreaded disease and a grandfather and his four grandchildren isolated on a hill – in the 20th century, an eccentric stone collector; an expanding quarry, a church that became a workshop and, later, a house; a landowner who cared about the cemetery and a high sheriff who didn’t; a junior high student who was curious; and a historian and grandfather who learned about them all and resolved to tell the story; and, finally, to place a monument at the site to honor the dead and remind Metacomet Trail hikers who walk by of what transpired 225 years ago.