The question came up after last week’s post about the length of mourning periods between remarriages in seventeenth-century New England. It has always been my (undocumented) impression that the traditional one-year mourning period was usually observed except for..

I opened Pandora’s box. Traditionally, Daniel Fisher is credited with marrying Abigail Marrett/Marriot/Marrott, etc., daughter of Great Migration parents Thomas and Susan (Wolfenden) Marrett.[1]

This is supported by the record of marriage in Dedham of Daniell Fisher to..

One of the upcoming Early New England Families Study Project sketches is that for Richard Lowell of Newbury, Massachusetts. Richard was the son of Percival Lowell, who came to New England in 1639 at the age of about 69 with several grown children. Richard, Percival’s..

When I started working on the Early New England Families Study Project sketch for Daniel Fisher of Dedham, I had a vague recollection that he might be one of my ancestors. However, once I pulled out my old folded, torn, and turning-brown 12-generation wall chart (only..

By now followers of my Vita Brevis posts are well aware that no genealogy is perfect. Period. No matter who wrote it.

The old mindset that a work published in a book or an article is automatically complete and completely accurate should be dead by now. The problem has..

Desktop publishing refers to computer programs that allow you to create works with both text and graphics in the same file. I never got into the Mac and Apple world, so my experience is only with PC programs such as Microsoft Word, which has always done well with text,..

The next new Early New England Families Study Project sketch to be uploaded will be for Roger Goodspeed of Barnstable. Roger is a first-generation immigrant who arrived in New England sometime before December 1641, when he was married in Barnstable to Alice/Allis..

I did not learn to spell properly until I learned to type at the Katharine Gibbs School. This may have had something to do with my less-than-perfect handwriting. Seeing a word in type instead of scribble helps me spot the errors.

In genealogy, of course, we run into..

I think I survived my first foray into online teaching Wednesday night when I gave my lecture on “Working in and Understanding Original Records” as the third presentation in the NEHGS Online Course “Researching New England,” a fee-based program open to NEHGS members.[1]

I just spent a nice afternoon with Tom, a fellow Alden descendant and historian, talking about the Alden legacy. He is gathering information on what he’s calling his “Aldens-engaging-with-Aldenness” project that may become a book.

He wanted to know how I was first..