Middleborough town officials have canceled or rescheduled outdoors activities between dusk and dawn after Eastern equine encephalitis virus was found in a local man. A statement from the town says the mosquito control program has been asked to continue with aggressive ground spraying, particularly in downtown and at sports fields and schools. Source: MyFoxBoston.com, August 29, 2010

Sysco Boston officials paid what was essentially a courtesy call to Middleboro selectmen Monday night. They presented their plans for the former Lakeville Hospital and fielded questions from selectmen and residents regarding the project’s impact on and benefits to Middleboro. Most of the questions dealt with the traffic that will be generated by Sysco’s planned 650,000 square foot distribution center. [...]

Thanks to the plethora of Middleboro residents who took the time to go to last Monday’s Board of Selectmen meeting, all residents are now free — once again — to speak their mind at public meetings. Middleboro Selectmen voted unanimously on Monday to adopt a new policy and allow free and open discussion during the public comments section of the [...]

An Avon-based food bank that provides hundreds of people in New England with discounted food in exchange for community service has stopped delivering food, and local chapters have been saddled with its debt. Serve New England Inc. is run primarily by volunteers who distribute food packages monthly at local churches, veterans halls and councils on aging. Typically people receive $50 [...]

Civil War enlistment papers. Citizenship certificates of newly arrived European immigrants. A newspaper account of a claim jumper shot in the back. They’re all part of the millions of documents connected with homestead claims dating to the 1860s — important pieces of America’s past that now will be preserved and for the first time analyzed on a large scale by [...]

The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System Web site at www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/ was labeled an “Editor’s Pick” in the July- August 2010 issue of Family Chronicle magazine. The listing of 6.3 million soldiers, both Union and Confederate, is complete and came from the National Archives, according to the magazine. It is a project of the National Park Service. Civil War sailors [...]

Carol Clingan’s hunger for connection with her Jewish ancestry sparked a daunting two-decade quest to track her forebears’ emigration from Ukraine and Belarus to New England generations ago and then find clues about their lives here. Many people tracing Jewish roots find stories with heartbreaking gaps as families were split apart by immigration and the horrors of the Holocaust, and [...]

During the August 9, 2010 Middleboro Board of Selectmen meeting, Chairwoman Marsha Brunelle caused a bit of stir with the listening audience when she effectively shut down freedom of speech at a public town meeting. Click here to read more about this in one of my earlier posts about this event as well as catch some video of the actual [...]

The concept of barcodes on tombstones and interactivity at the cemetery was considered too far-fetched when Glenn Toothman first traveled to funeral industry conferences 10 years ago. After years of waiting, technological developments have finally allowed Toothman to get to a point of “rebirth” for his Pennsylvania-based company, the Memory Medallion. Toothman has always been a “frustrated electronic engineer,” and [...]

Thousands of documents pertaining to the town’s seemingly defunct casino deal with the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe are up for public inspection. The documents, which include engineering studies, maps, deeds, plans, letters and public notices, were part of a broad public-records request the tribe filed with the town last month. Tribal leaders have not said why they requested the documents. “I [...]