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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.”

New Hampshire Sentinel (Keene, New Hampshire), 23 March 1827, page 3

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.

New Hampshire Patriot & State Gazette (Concord, New Hampshire), 4 February 1822, page 1

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.

New Hampshire Patriot & State Gazette (Concord, New Hampshire), 24 November 1828, page 1

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).

New Hampshire Sentinel (Keene, New Hampshire), 14 April 1836, page 3

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.

New Hampshire Sentinel (Keene, New Hampshire), 14 April 1836, page 3

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.”

Source: Internet Archive

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.