Vita Brevis

A recent episode of Jeopardy! had one of the greatest instances of coincidence in the Final Jeopardy clue, where the answer was: In 1896, the Vassar-educated wife of this man wrote, “thousands of dollars may be paid for a copy of Shakespeare.” Emily Croke was the only..

The New York Times Magazine recently published a story on the ancestry of the new Pope. The article was by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in collaboration with American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami. I was one of the researchers tasked with working on some of..

If you are ever in Essex County, Massachusetts, there is an interesting cemetery within the Maudslay State Park in Newburyport. It is a pet cemetery and features seven gravestones of beloved pets that once belonged to the wealthy Moseley family. 

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..