February 4, 2016
I was looking at the marriage announcement for my cousins Isaac and Annis (Dinsmoor) Cochran, and was surprised to see the name of her father given as the “Rustic Bard.”
The “Rustic Bard” – I wonder who that was?
So – I dug deeper into GenealogyBank’s Historical Newspaper Archives and did a search for “Rustic Bard,” and found this poem.
This could be a clue.
The poem speaks of “The Bard of Windham hill” and refers to him as “The rustic Bard.”
Another poem dated 8 November 1828 was also published in the New Hampshire Patriot & State Gazette.
This poem was untitled and presented as a letter to the editor.
It looks like the poet’s initials were “R. D,” and he was identified as the “Rustic Bard.”
Looking further through the GenealogyBank search results I found this lengthy obituary for the poet R. D. (Robert Dinsmoor).
Genealogists love to find an obituary like this. It gives a lot of details of his life and talks about his ancestry right back into Scotland.
The obituary says that as a young man, Robert showed promise as a mathematician – but poetry soon became his chief interest.
Learning that Robert published a book of his poems in 1828, I went to the Internet Archive – the major online repository of digital books – and quickly found “Poems of Robert Dinsmoor, the Rustic Bard.”
See: https://archive.org/details/poemsofrobertdin00dins
I love it. Researching in GenealogyBank for my cousin’s marriage record, I was able to find this interesting story about Annis Dinsmoor’s father Robert Dinsmoor, the “Rustic Bard.”
Get the entire story.
Look at the clues in newspaper articles and go wherever they take you to get the complete picture of your ancestors’ lives.
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This was very good reading about the Rustic Bard. What it did was remind me that one of my ancestors was the Swamp Fox of the Revolutionary War. At least this is what we were made to believe as my brothers and I grew up. I’ll have to get onto your web-site and check it out for myself.
Thanks for all you do for those “searching.” All we as Americans need to grasp onto our ancestry; it can be as diverse as any one could ever believe.
Excellent Tina –
Let us know what you find about your family.
Tom