Mural in Oswego, Kansas, depicting the Osage village of White Hair circa 1841 (via Wikimedia Commons)
Continue readingAt the turn of the twentieth century, Mary True Randall set up a photography studio with a dark room in her father’s house opposite Pittsford, Vermont’s Village Green. For almost 20 years, her camera captured children in formal poses and at play, quaint scenes of rural..
Continue reading →1863 print depicting American artist Washington Allston
I have lived in Allston, a neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts, for about three years. For most of that time, I never gave the area’s name much thought. I assumed that it was either the name of a town back in..
Continue reading →Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a member of the third generation of Anoa’i family wrestlers, at WWE Wrestlemania 28 in 2012
I am about to share a secret that few, if any of my fellow researchers at American Ancestors know about me: I love professional wrestling. I was..
Continue reading →“Clubbed in Rent Riots”—while digging online for information about my great-great-grandparents, this sensationalistic headline from The Baltimore Sun leapt out of the screen, grabbing my attentionmore than one hundred years after it was first published.
Continue reading →Jill Biden and Stephen Nedoroschik at the 2024 Olympics, Wikimedia Commons
Continue reading →Touro Synagogue from Patriots Park (Photo by author)
You might know Newport, Rhode Island, for its plethora of beautiful and historic mansions, many of which overlook the Atlantic coast. Maybe you know that the city hosted the first U.S. Open Tournaments for both..
Continue reading →Illustration of a home in Freetown, Massachusetts, circa 1895
Continue reading →A barefooted Lucille Coffin, date unknown.
Names are the bedrock of family history research. Finding, sorting, and verifying them takes time. Shared names between generations can cause confusion—such as in the case of professional baseball player Wilmer Flores, whose..
Continue reading →Omaha Beach, 6 June 1944. By Robert F. Sargent
The world will pause today to remember the events in France which occurred eighty years ago during “Operation Overlord”—better remembered as D-Day. Many fine young men would not come home to their families from those..
Continue reading →