Americas
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Hanging of Mary Dyer
Mary Barret was born around 1611 in England although where exactly isn’t known. A probate document remains from 1633/4 from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury concerning the estate of what appears to be the estate of her brother, William Barret, leaving his assets to Mary and her husband, which suggests that their parents were deceased and that William had no heirs. It could also highlight that Canterbury was close to the area in which Mary and her brother were born or lived. Mary married William Dyer, a milliner, in 1633, original from Lincolnshire, in St Martin in the Fields on 27th October 1633, and a child, William Jr was born…
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The General Slocum
On Wednesday, June 15, 1904 the ship was chartered for $350 by St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Little Germany district of Manhattan. Over 1,400 passengers, mostly women and children, boarded the Slocum, which was to sail up the East River and then eastward across the Long Island Sound to Locust Grove, a picnic site in Eatons Neck, Long Island. Around 9:30 a.m. the ship began its doomed trip. As it was passing East 90th Street, a fire started in the Lamp Room in the forward section, possibly caused by a discarded cigarette or match. It was fueled by the straw, oily rags, and lamp oil strewn around the…
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Marie Laveau The Voodoo Queen of New Orleans
When you think of New Orleans, Louisiana, most people automatically think of Jazz music, Great food, Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street, but we can’t forget about Voodoo and the Voodoo Queen herself Marie Laveau. She is probably one of New Orleans greatest Historical figures and what we know about her life is very little. Let me explain about Voodoo a little first. I am not going to dwell on it to much right now, maybe in a later post. Voodoo was brought to French Louisiana during the colonial period by workers and slaves from West Africa and later by slaves and free people of colour who were among the refugees from…
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Founding of New Orleans
La Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans) was founded May 7, 1718, by the French Mississippi Company, under the direction of French Louisiana Governor Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on land inhabited by the Chitimacha.The first known residents of the New Orleans area were the Native Americans of the Woodland and Mississippian cultures. The expeditions of De Soto and La Salle passed through the area, but there were few permanent non-native settlers before 1718.Louisiana was claimed for Fran [...]
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Mountain Meadows Massacre
On September 11th, 1857, a group of migrants travelling from Arkansas to their new home in California, were massacred in a valley in Utah known as Mountain Meadows, ostensibly by a group of Paiute Indians following a siege lasting several days. The Baker-Fancher group totalled around 140 members of an extended family or families. Quite well-off by standards of the day, they were making their way by wagon train with horses, mules and cattle to resettle from Arkansas. Led by Alexander Fancher, known as “Colonel” an experienced man on the migrant route, the train had started out with several smaller parties each from different counties in Arkansas, and had met…
