The names my parents ended up giving their children – Christopher, Carolyn, and Katherine – are names that most people would probably consider not that unusual. But there were several other names my father had in mind. For a boy, he liked the..

[Editor's note: This post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 20 February 2014.]

I frequently encounter eighteenth- or nineteenth-century dates, especially on the migration trail, that are not cited and which often derive from “online trees,” usually the FamilySearch..

While editing the Winter 2016 issue of Mayflower Descendant, I searched the draft articles for additional genealogical facts for the families presented. Christopher Carter Lee’s article – “Elizabeth (Briggs) Shippey and her husband..

Today marks the one-hundredth birthday of my great-aunt Maxine Smith of Newton, Kansas. My mother flew..

In my recent lectures on DNA, I have discussed the nature of X chromosome inheritance. Owing to the fact that males inherit Y chromosomes from their fathers (who received it only from their fathers,..

Reading Scott Steward’s post about surnames being changed to keep another family name going reminded me of two examples we encountered when we wrote The Descendants of Judge John Lowell of Newburyport, Massachusetts together.

The first..

As I have mentioned in a previous post, my grandfather was raised in the northeastern Connecticut town of Woodstock, a..

I was fascinated by the story released in The New York Times last Wednesday regarding the DNA research to help establish that Warren..

As a personal challenge, after seeing a few..

As a personal challenge, after seeing a few genealogist friends on Facebook post ancestor charts with photographs of their ancestors back to (in many cases) their great-great-grandparents, I decided to see how “complete” my..