Did your ancestor serve in office in Connecticut, are you interested in Connecticut laws, or Connecticut history?

  Sometimes you need a bit of Connecticut history to help your research along... If your ancestor served in office, you'll need to know in what years and in what position they served. If you study a will or land record, you might need to know the applicable laws.

That's where the Connecticut State Register and Manual can help. Published since the early 1800s, it lists state officials, expenses for school districts and more. Versions published from 2008 to the present are available online. Looking for earlier? We have almost a complete run, beginning in 1804.

1841 edition

Daughters of the American Revolution Insignia has Middletown Ties

     Some of Godfrey's collections touch on history far outside the Library's New England focus. The insignia of the Daughters of the American Revolution is a point of pride for the Society. One Godfrey collection suggests that the insignia might have had Connecticut ties.

    The Godfrey Library is the repository of the Collection of books and papers of Daughters of the American Revolution, Wadsworth Chapter. Page 29 of the Historian's Report, Volume II recounts the founding of the Chapter - and its ties to the insignia's creator. According to the website of a South Carolina DAR chapter, George Goode designed the insignia, modeling it on his mother's spinning wheel.
    
      "Our indebtedness to Dr. G. Brown Goode of Washington, and to his wife, our first member, can never be over-estimated. Dr. Goode, a graduate of Wesleyan and a citizen of Middletown (we are proud to recall) while visiting friends in Middletown, in  1891, spoke of his great interest in a new society that was organized a year before in Washington, and known as the Daughters of the American Revolution. He so impressed some of our patriotic women that he was requested to forward from Washington the requisite application blanks, twelve in number. These blanks were received and soon executed, and his ladies are now designed as charter members of Wadsworth Chapter."

     Wadsworth Chapter, Connecticut's first, therefore, can claim a role in the creation of DAR's best known symbol - or perhaps the reverse is true!

    Interested in the history of Connecticut's DAR chapters? Check out our library catalog for a DAR publications, papers, and more!
    

Middletown Midwife Records

Birth records of any kind are invaluable to genealogists.  These are most often found in vital records for a town or county or sometimes in church records, though baptismal records are more common.  At the Godfrey Library, we are lucky enough to have a very unique birth record for Middletown and Ansonia Connecticut as a part of our collection.  In 2009, Marie Carta donated the record book kept by her great aunt, Sebastiana Grimaldi Misenti, a midwife.  But Sebastiana was not just any midwife: because she was born and initially raised in Melilli Italy, she was the midwife of choice for all the Italian families in Middletown and Ansonia who emigrated from that area.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s the Middletown area experienced a flood of immigrants from the village of Melilli on the island of Sicily.  Immigrants traveled to the Middletown area on the advice of a former resident of Melilli who wrote home about the great opportunities the Middletown area afforded.  Though they were not the first Italians to settle in the Middletown area, by virtue of sheer numbers the population of immigrants from Melilli had an enormous impact on Middletown's history.

Families from Melilli formed a close knit community in the area east of Main Street Middletown.   It was this community and a similar population in Ansonia that Sebastiana served as a midwife.  Her record book in the Godfrey collection contains the names of 934 children she delivered from 1909 to 1935.  Each entry contains the gender and name of the child delivered, the name of their mother and father, and their date of birth.  The records are written entirely in Italian.  The Godfrey was lucky enough to have a volunteer whose first language was Italian to help us index these records.  The index and scans of the original records are available in the Godfrey Scholar Digital Collection.

If you have Italian ancestors from Middletown or Ansonia Connecticut who originally hailed from Melilli Italy it is highly likely that they or their children were delivered by Sebastiana.  She sounds like an amazing woman who made an incredible impact in her community.  Despite this, there is little information to be found about her.  Her grave is a simple stone in the St. Sebastian's Cemetery (found using the Ed Laput Cemetery Project).  These records and that stone may be the only remaining evidence of the life that helped so many.

This Week on the Scholar

Below is a list of the latest books and records added to the Godfrey Scholar Online Access. Next we will add more of the Godfrey's unique content from our physical collection that cannot be found anywhere else, including funeral records, church records, and much more!  Expect to see the rest of the Coughlin Lastrina Funeral Home records added to the Scholar within the next week!

Biographies
The Genius and Character of Emerson
Maria Sanford

Church Records
Cromwell First Congregational Church Book of Remembrance 1889-1962
Portland Evangelical Lutheran Zion Church Record Book, 1880-1888
Portland Evangelical Lutheran Zion Church Record Book Volume 2, 1903 and on

Funeral Home Records
Coughlin-Lastrina Funeral Home Records: Burial Returns March 1912 to November 1914 Index
Roberts Funeral Home Record Cards, 1941-1942

Genealogies
Cuccel Family Records
Descendants of Richard Smyrk
Willard, Twigs and Branches

Military: Civil War
Sketches of War History 1861-1865: Volume 3

 Not a Scholar?  Visit our website to subscribe or call the library at (860) 346-4375 to join today