The Trip to America

From the Sketch of the Life of Robert Ball Hughes by Mrs. E. Ball Hughes, pp. 3 & 4, we read that “… shortly after his marriage to Miss Wright – the daughter of David Wright of Oxford St. London they started November 12th 1828 for New York in the ship Robert Edwards, one of the regular line of Packets, and after severe storms landed in New York on the 19th of January 1829.”

I wanted to know more about the ship Robert Edwards and the Ball Hughe's ten-week voyage to America. Initially, I found only one article and put the research on hold. Recently I found several more articles including one on Old Fulton Post Cards newspaper archive at http://www.fultonhistory.com/

The article contained the account of arrival of the Robert Edwards in New York, with a passenger list that included the Ball Hughe's. That article included details about the storms and the Ship Master’s name. That led to more information about the London Line of packets.

A project like this new page takes many hours of research over several weeks or months before the information can be summarized. The actual posting on the new web page took about four hours to edit and format.

Read more about the arrival of the Ball Hughes at Ship Robert Edwards on RobertBallHughes.com.

Mr. Bowditch has left the building.

The over-life-size plaster model for the bronze statue of Nathaniel Bowditch has left the Boston Athenaeum for the first time since its arrival in 1851. He doesn't get out much!

Read more about his departure at The Conservation of a Historic American Masterpiece, Boston Athenaeum E-Newsletter: November 2010, Volume 4, Issue 11. See also the Nathaniel Bowditch Statue on RobertBallHughes.com for more information about the statue.

Obituary for Robert Ball Hughes

The Obituary for Robert Ball Hughes has eluded me for several years. I finally found it through Google News Archives on p. 2 of the Boston Daily Evening Transcript for Friday, March 6, 1868.

It turns out I had most of the text already on the Biography page on RobertBallHughes.com. It was quoted in The New England Historical & Genealogical Register For the Year 1868, Vol. XXII, p. 185, after Ball Hughe's death. Part of the first sentence and one complete sentence starting with “For some time past…” were omitted.

I could not find this article directly with Google Search. The digitizing of newspapers is not always accurate due to the condition of the paper and the limitations of character recognition software.

After finding the daily issues of the newspaper for March 1868, it was a matter of reading an entire paper, starting with March 5th issue, to find the article about Ball Hughes. This can be a tedious, especially if it turns out that there is no information to be found.

Since the obituary was not in the March 5th issue, I hoped that it might be in the March 6th issue, and it was. It helps to have a range of dates to narrow down the search.

I also found another obituary from The (London) Art-Journal that was based on the New York Tribune obituary that I have not seen yet.

Read more at the Obituary for Robert Ball Hughes on RobertBallHughes.com.