“She tells white lies to ice a wedding cake.” - Margot Asquith
As students of family history, we spend our time and curiosity trying to discover the reasons why our ancestors kept so many secrets!..
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In days of yore, when I was in college, locating published articles on historical topics required hours sifting through library stacks and individual journal indexes, then laboriously photocopying each page of each article. Thankfully, in today’s digital world, we have
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One hundred years ago today, on 29 May 1917, Rose Kennedy gave birth to the future president of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in a charming three-story Colonial on a lovely street in Brookline, Massachusetts. That same..
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May is Jewish Heritage Month, so in its honor I decided to look into my own Jewish heritage.
Even though I work at a genealogical society, I always felt that it was a worthless pursuit to try to trace..
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Many of the vernacular photos I’ve bought in the last few months have no information about the sitter – sometimes the subject is identified by a nickname, such as “Stinky.” I recently bought an intriguing image of a man (apparently) dancing,..
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Earlier this month I went to the National Genealogical Society conference in Raleigh, North Carolina; it was my first time in the Tar Heel State. While I have many southern ancestors who started out in Virginia and Maryland before heading..
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The town of Lee, Massachusetts holds special meaning to my maternal side of the family. My grandmother, Hope Elizabeth Dunn, was the daughter of William..
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I recently traveled to Michigan to watch my cousin, Scott, graduate from Michigan State University (Go Spartans!) with a law degree. And like any good family member/genealogist, while I sat with my family waiting for the commencement to..
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I have just received the last volume in Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs’ Plymouth Colony town records series – see my earlier post on the records of Sandwich and Eastham. The Town Records of Duxbury, Bridgewater, and Dartmouth during the Time of Plymouth Colony, 1620–1692, like..
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My mother’s dad Frank White Lee (1908–1988) was a quiet man. He worked hard, and his silence was a mode we were taught to give all due consideration. Once, when my sisters and I were a bit too raucous, my grandfather told us that we needed to be..
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Shortly after I began work at NEHGS about ten years ago, we went into all-hands-on-deck mode. The occasion was the National Genealogical Society’s annual conference, which was in Boston that year and bringing many visitors to the building. A newbie, I was assigned the..
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Recently, I've started visiting the cemeteries of my ancestors. Fortunately, most of my maternal ancestors stayed in the Boston area after immigrating, so it hasn’t been too difficult.
A few months ago, I visited St. Joseph's Cemetery in West Roxbury in search of the..
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Behind the scenes, the NEHGS web team is hard at work preparing the searchable version of our Roman Catholic Archdiocese records. As part of that process, our volunteers create spreadsheets that associate information with a specific image file. I proofread these..
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As the New England Regional Genealogical Conference was held recently in Springfield, Massachusetts, I am reminded of my brief genealogical connection to that city and the incredible value..
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I recently saw an interesting infographic about writing success. Although the focus is on writing novels, several of the hints apply to writing a family history:
Let’s look at each one of these in..
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My grandmother Katheryn Ogle Record (1914–1993) was a dead head. No, surely not that kind of dead head, but one who collected those lifetime addenda we all hope someone will afford..
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When I first started working at NEHGS in November 2015 and was introduced to Gary Boyd Roberts, he shook my hand and said, “Tell me about your family.” I told him my mother was half Cape Breton Scottish and Yorkshire English, and half..
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Typically, when researching family history, finding documents in which individuals state their relationship to each other is a source of excitement. These kinds of discoveries provide researchers with crucial information for genealogical research. However, during my..
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I recently bought a striking pair of photographs by White Studio of New York. The first was sold as showing an attractive couple dancing, but when I received it I could see that one partner was identified: Mrs. E. B...
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In sorting out a DNA match recently, I uncovered a rather puzzling family story. On 23andme, my father’s closest “stranger match” was a person I will call “J.O.H.” She and my father shared 0.83% DNA along 5 DNA segments, for a total of 62 centimorgans, with a predicted..
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Between 2 March 1907 and 22 September 1922, the Expatriation Act of 1907 required a woman who married a foreigner to take the nationality of her husband, and therefore she lost her own citizenship. The Cable Act (also known as the..
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We family historians can never get enough of a good thing, right? So in the fall of 2012 when my son and his fiancée tied the knot I was thrilled for..
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