By Carol Hubbell Boggs

The Hubbell Family Historical Society is proud to announce that the book Hubbell By Choice: The Ancestry of Some Early Connecticut Women, (2008) co-authored by Mary Ann Hubbell and Marjorie Hubbell Gibson has won the prestigious Connecticut Society of Genealogists’ Literary Award “Grand Prize for Genealogy” for 2009. The prize will be awarded on May 16, 2009 at the CSG annual meeting at the Hawthorne Inn in Berlin, Connecticut.Sadly, one of the principal authors, Marjorie Hubbell Gibson, passed away the morning word arrived that the book had been chosen, and never knew that the book had been selected for the award. Her daughters, Anne Gibson and Carol Gibson were informed only hours after her death, and have agreed to attend the meeting to accept the award on hers and the Society’s behalf, as she would have wished.

Begun in 2000, the project involved five Hubbell women descendants or spouses who felt strongly that the “distaff side” of the early Colonial families was given short shrift and their families were sometimes obscured by history and difficult for current day researchers to track. The five also included Bertie Herman in Texas, Barbara Kruse in Long Island, NY, and Carol Hubbell Boggs in North Carolina. Mary Ann and Marjorie lived in Utah and Cape Cod. They conferred at length via email, telephone, and personal visits for years, collecting data, photos, corrections, and permissions for publication of copyrighted material, editing, and discussing various methods of publishing.

During those years the usual life events occurred in each household, but some unusual ones happened as well. Bertie was twice driven from her home for a period of weeks for Hurricanes Rita and Gustav and she and her husband are still living in a FEMA trailer. When the team missed the original 2001 publication target date and 2003 came around Carol stepped aside to become president of the Society. Each year brought more information and more changes.

Because the book evolved over a number of years, the team was able to take advantage of the changes in the publishing industry and made the decision to use Print On Demand (POD) technology to hold down costs and inventory for the Society. Experienced authors might feel that ten years is not unusually long for such research, but for the five team members, it seemed forever, and was a valuable and enjoyable experience for all concerned. Originally there was talk of researching and writing one more generation, but that can be left to others now that the mold has been established. Visit the THFHS Store for directions to obtain your copy from Lulu.com.