Vita Brevis

Readers have asked how to cite Internet sources. Confession, I don’t really know the answer – and I don’t think many others do, either. It is a new, still-evolving discipline complicated by the transitory nature of the beast, where links to pages get changed and/or..

Just as Morris Gray seems to have been a model child, so Regina Shober Gray’s only daughter, Mary (1848–1923), appears to advantage in her mother’s diary. Inclined..

My grandfather once told me that his parents had to wait for several years to marry. When they did, in January 1885, my great-grandfather was 32 and his bride 23 – hardly old by our standards, perhaps! My grandfather’s box of family papers yields a copy of the wedding..

I received a phone call the other day from my parents as they were driving through Kansas on a road trip. They wanted to tell me about a curious roadside advertisement they had seen that they thought would interest me: the National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia,..

Some Vita Brevis readers have sent me really nice samples of what they are doing using the Early New England Families Study Project format model. Thanks, you are all “on point” and doing a great job. Plenty of questions have been sent, too, so let’s address some of..

A few months ago, my husband and I moved to Dorchester, Massachusetts, to work as caretakers of the William Clapp house, which was built in 1806. William Clapp and his wife, Elizabeth (Humphreys) Clapp, were married in the parlor of this house on 15 December 1806. They..

In 2010, I visited the town of Rose in Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, to meet the nieces and nephew of Ada Lophemia (Halliday) Clark. Ada was the second wife of my great-grandfather Thomas William Clark of Moncton, New Brunswick. Within the walls of their ancestral..

When Chicken Little said the sky was falling, I did not take that to mean corsets and shoe lasts. I’ve learned while restoring and renovating my old house that the unexpected is to be expected, that making a change here means a ripple effect of..

Riffing on something Chris Child wrote about collecting photos of family members in July, I thought I might do something similar with information about family burial plots. Such an exercise leans heavily on Findagrave.com (where some of the images may be found),..

Perhaps more than any other event, the introduction of photography altered how individuals were memorialized and are remembered. While portraits have been..

While working on the Early New England Families Study Project sketch on..

Nine Vita Brevis readers took the plunge and sent in a set of complete answers to Monday’s research challenge. Thank you all for participating!

The winner had ten answers correct out of eleven; not a single person identified..

Regina Shober Gray’s diary abounds in telling details and contemporary gossip; in some ways, her views on the marriages (and marriage prospects) of her friends call..

I tried this for July 4, and thought it might be fun to try it again: I have several photos of Hollywood actors and actresses associated with a director and a film, and I wonder if some Vita Brevis readers can square the circle and..

It was a matter of some pride to my grandfather that his great-grandfather John Steward (1777–1854) bought the (downtown) Gracie Mansion[1] when he moved to New York more than two hundred years ago. Perhaps so, as John Steward lived at 1 Pearl Street until he moved far..

One of the most remarkable entries in the Regina Shober Gray diary – a document not short on remarkable entries – is the one where the diarist recounts a vivid..

There is a tendency, I think, to imagine that our ancestors moved around far less than we do, that they were parked in one spot for years at a time – perhaps..

[Editor’s Note: Between June and August of this year, Alicia wrote two series on her research and writing methodologies. In the interest of bringing them together, and sharing them with a fresh audience, they are offered again, with some of the author’s commentary. The..

Every family history researcher hopes diligence and persistence will bring forth enough details of an ancestor’s life to fill out a void on the family tree. There is always hope that serendipity will produce unexpected history gold in..

After the turn of the nineteenth century, the number of medical schools around the world increased significantly. While the increase in these institutions led to monumental developments in the medical field, it also had previously unforeseen consequences. One such..

Six new sketches have been posted in the Early New England Families Study Project database:[1]

John Dunham (c. 1615–1692), son of John Dunham (GM); married Mary ___; settled in Plymouth; farmer; 7 children.

Richard Newton (c. 1606–1701) married Ann/Hannah Loker alias..