This presentation follows the journey of 19th-century emigrants departing Liverpool for new lives across the seas. From medical inspections and shady brokers to sailing conditions and shipboard meals, explore the detailed logistics, official regulations, and personal stories behind mass emigration.

 

Seema Jayne-Kenney is a wife, mother of three, and entrepreneur, She is an experienced software instructor and a professional genealogist. Based on over 20 years of research, her known roots are deep in New England as well as England, Germany, and Sweden. Her DNA research has now added the Netherlands to that list. Seema has a certificate in Genealogical Research from BU, completed ProGen and is an active member of several societies and part of the NERGC planning committee.

 

700 Boylston St.

Merrimack Valley Chapter welcomes you to a morning of genealogical discussions. Have a question about how to use Family Search? Need suggestions to help break through a brick wall? Want to share a discovery with other genealogists who appreciate your hard work and share your excitement? Come join us at the Georgetown Peabody Library. Bring your laptop, any files, photos, or family treasures you'd like to share...we can swap stories and enjoy each others' company.

The U.S. Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world but also one of the most difficult to amend. Jill Lepore, Harvard professor of history and law, explains why in We the People, the most original history of the Constitution in decades―and an essential companion to her landmark history of the United States, These Truths.

 

Published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding―the anniversary, too, of the first state constitutions―We the People offers a wholly new history of the Constitution. “One of the Constitution’s founding purposes was to prevent change,” Lepore writes. “Another was to allow for change without violence.” Relying on the extraordinary database she has assembled at the Amendments Project, Lepore recounts centuries of attempts, mostly by ordinary Americans, to realize the promise of the Constitution. Yet nearly all those efforts have failed. Although nearly twelve thousand amendments have been introduced in Congress since 1789, and thousands more have been proposed outside its doors, only twenty-seven have ever been ratified. More troubling, the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. Without recourse to amendment, she argues, the risk of political violence rises. So does the risk of constitutional change by presidential or judicial fiat.

 

Challenging both the Supreme Court’s monopoly on constitutional interpretation and the flawed theory of “originalism,” Lepore contends in this “gripping and unfamiliar story of our own past” that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. The framers never intended for the Constitution to be preserved, like a butterfly, under glass, Lepore argues, but expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution through an orderly deliberative and democratic process.

 

Lepore’s remarkable history seeks, too, to rekindle a sense of constitutional possibility. Congressman Jamie Raskin writes that Lepore “has thrown us a lifeline, a way of seeing the Constitution neither as an authoritarian straitjacket nor a foolproof magic amulet but as the arena of fierce, logical, passionate, and often deadly struggle for a more perfect union.” At a time when the Constitution’s vulnerability is all too evident, and the risk of political violence all too real, We the People, with its shimmering prose and pioneering research, hints at the prospects for a better constitutional future, an amended America. (Amazon Review)

 

3:00 pm Tour of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) Library

Followed by dinner at a local restaurant

Additional details TBA