User:QuillPenHistorical

Quill Pen Historical Consulting

“We bring the past to life”

Quill Pen Historical Consulting brings unique professional expertise in history and law — and years of hands-on experience — to help you with a wide range of projects.

Our specialty is New England — particularly court records and other primary sources—and we are centrally located for work in repositories throughout the region — state and national archives, courthouses, libraries and little-known local and private collections. We also have desktop access to a vast array of electronic databases — historical, genealogical, legal and scholarly — for research from the 17th to the 21st centuries.

Diane Rapaport, the principal consultant for Quill Pen Historical Consulting, is an attorney, historian, award-winning author and popular speaker. She recently appeared on the BBC TV series, Who Do You Think You Are? Her first book, New England Court Records: A Research Guide for Genealogists and Historians, won Benjamin Franklin Awards (Independent Book Publishers Association) for Best History Book, Best Reference Book, and finalist for Best New Voice in Nonfiction. Her latest book, The Naked Quaker: True Crimes and Controversies from the Courts of Colonial New England, was a finalist for ForeWord magazine’s Book of the Year Award for History.

Quill Pen Historical Consulting’s customized services include:

Historical and genealogical research


 * We work on-site at repositories in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.


 * We handle everything from quick record look-ups to in-depth studies. Or for clients who wish to do most of their own research, we can serve as an expert advisor, suggesting lines of inquiry and identifying pertinent resources.


 * We can help with lineage society applications and documentation (Mayflower Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, Sons of the American Revolution, etc.), preparing the paperwork and doing the research to find the authoritative proof you need.


 * We have substantial experience reading early American handwriting and decoding abbreviations and arcane terminology, especially in court records and legal manuscripts.

Writing, editing and indexing family, community and organizational histories


 * Our slogan, “We bring the past to life,” is especially applicable to our writing services. We excel at uncovering intriguing facts about people, places and events from the past and presenting those stories in a way that will engage and instruct the target audience. We believe that historical writing can — and should — be interesting, while adhering to the highest standards of scholarship.


 * We will present the story of your family, organization, locality or other historical subject in whatever format best suits your needs, from timelines and brief histories (for articles, brochures, museum displays, historic site interpretation or website content) to book-length histories.


 * We also offer editing and indexing services for your manuscripts.