Our Maine Families

Welcome, to ‘’Our Maine Families’’! This is a growing archive of family documents, ancestry charts and photos for the Johnston and Hutchins families and interrelated extended families who lived in Maine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feel free to email me with any questions. To view the archive and table of contents click on Go to Archive in the upper left hand corner of this page. There you can toggle on and off headings and subheadings. A three page letter will have a file for each page. The search bar on the home page allows searches by any keyword you might choose. Below the search bar you can also open up an index to subjects and persons. .I hope you enjoy your time here! Margaret mbienert7@northmail.ca margaret.bienert@gmail.com

There were some interesting discoveries made in sorting through documents and photos at the Hutchins home on River Road this past summer. Among them were very old family letters, including letters written to Mark Lisherness Hutchins (Thurston’s father) by his brothers who were Union Soldiers in the Civil War. One letter from Enos Hutchins is dated September 13, 1864 - almost 160 years ago to the date of my writing this post! These letters are all being uploaded here.. I hope you enjoy discovering their contents along with me! Any help in transcribing these would always welcome!

Overwhelmed with the task of preserving and sharing their grandmother's letters, diaries, photos, and other personal documents for future generations, cousins Kimball Clark and Cathy Gilmore realized they needed a solution beyond digitizing. They envisioned a tool that empowered individuals, families, and organizations to be custodians of their own histories. With that vision in mind, they built Kindex: A digital archival tool that bridges the divide between institutional archives and privately-held collections. Kindex helps groups collaborate, transcribe, and share their collections. These tools have democratized the archival process for many families and organizations who would otherwise be unable to do so by making private collections discoverable, accessible, and searchable. With the power archives have to bridge generations, cross cultural boundaries, and diversify the historical record, Kindex became determined to help families and groups with end-to-end archival solutions.