Sheldon Genealogy is delighted to present to you our first video chat featuring a Sheldon of note. Please let me introduce you to Ames Sheldon historian and author.

Ames Sheldon grew up in Wayzata, Minnesota. After graduating from Northrop Collegiate School, she attended Bryn Mawr College, where she majored in English. After graduating, she worked in the legal department of a multi-national chemical company, as a reporter at two newspapers, as office manager of a start-up auto salvage yard, and eventually as a grant writer and development officer for a variety of nonprofit organizations, ranging from the Sierra Club in San Francisco to the Minnesota Historical Society and the Minneapolis Public Library. She has an M.A. in American Studies.

Ames decided she wanted to be a writer at the age of nine. Many short stories and poems later, she worked as lead author and associate editor of the ground-breaking Women’s History Sources: A Guide to Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States (Bowker, 1979), which contains descriptions of collections of original primary source materials pertaining to the history of tens of thousands of women and women’s organizations from the colonial period through the 1970s. In the process of working on this monumental 1,100-page reference book, Ames discovered her love for women’s history and for using primary sources for research.

Ames’ Sheldon Genealogy

While arranging to interview Ames I researched her lineage and found that Ames and I are 5th cousins once removed. Our shared ancestor is Isaac Sheldon born in South Kingston Rhode Island in 1730 son of Thomas Sheldon and Harriet Winters. Thomas is first recorded in Pawling, Dutchess County New York in February of 1747. Isaac appears on the records there from 1756-1778. In 1777 Isaac Sheldon served on the Committee for Sequestration during the Revolutionary War. By 1800 Isaac has moved to Willsboro, Essex County, New York. He dies there in 1813. Isaac and his wife Sarah Gifford have 15 children together; Kelly’s ancestor Justus is the 7th child and 3rd son; Ames ancestor Nehemiah is the 13th, and last child of this union and the 7th son. One more child is born to Isaac and Deborah Haight, the 15th! Sheldon Genealogy’s President Dale is also a descendant of Isaac through his son Gideon the 6th son and 12th child.

Lemons in The Garden of Love: Synopsis

It’s 1977 and Cassie Lyman, a graduate student in women’s history, is struggling to find a topic for her doctoral dissertation. When she discovers a trove of suffrage cartoons, diaries, and letters at Smith College belonging to Kate Easton, founder of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts in 1916, she believes she has located her subject.

Digging deeper into Kate’s life, Cassie learns that she and Kate are related—closely. Driven to understand why her family has never spoken of Kate, Cassie travels to Cape Ann to attend her sister’s wedding, where she questions her female relatives. Her quest to ascertain the truth about Kate unearths painful family secrets. Soon Cassie is shocked to find herself in the same challenging situation Kate faced.