Vita Brevis

A few years before the death of my father, Frank Dwyer, in 2015, he described a harrowing incident he witnessed outside his home during the early days of World War II. Dad grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts, on a property his Cassidy grandparents, Irish immigrants..

As I've made my way through the lives of my ancestors, I am continually dumbfounded by what has simply been forgotten. It's hard not to keep asking oneself, Did anyone in the family know this? How come they never said…

I remember my first time visiting Lexington and Concord as a child. Even at that time I knew some of the stories about my ancestors in the American Revolution. One was my maternal fourth great-grandfather Capt. Jonathan Poor (1737-1807) of Newbury, Essex,..

Every now and then my research takes me into the murky corners of history, inter-personal drama, and catastrophic tragedy, making it suddenly feel like I’m watching a binge-worthy Netflix series instead of doing my job. That’s when I reach for my phone or turn to my..

Please, I'm in a bit of trouble.

I sure hope you won't rat me out. I know I haven't been around the Vita Brevis in a while, but I had to tell someone. You see, I've fallen in with a bad crowd. I've become something of a (gasp)…genealogical heretic. Recently, while..

I had the privilege of attending the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) annual meeting, which was held in Providence, Rhode Island, this year. At the last academic conference I attended, I was still a newly minted PhD discussing my academic research...

My 2^nd-great-grandfather Ephraim Chamberlain had an interesting career as a photographer. Traditional genealogical research showed that he was born in Sweden, Oxford County, Maine, on 11 August 1843 and died in Wakefield, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, on 22 October..

In the course of their research, genealogists often need to identify an ancestor’s origins before they arrived in the United States. There are many types of records that can be used for this research, with varying degrees of usefulness. Naturalization records are an..

If you grew up in New England, there’s a good chance you know a Kimball, have met a Kimball, or have at least heard the name Kimball. It’s a common surname in these parts. It has also been said that any given Kimball could potentially be related to the same two..

1897 map of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, Matthews-Northrup Company (via Wikimedia Commons)

One “employment perk” at American Ancestors is a complementary consultation with one of our genealogists, and every now and then I get paired with a colleague for such..