All posts by Penny Stratton

Facebook’s Locational Genealogy Groups

Portion of the marriage certificate of Engelhardt Heene and Anna Theresia Czerwinski, which someone in Facebook’s German Genealogy Records Transcription Group transcribed and translated for the author.

Did you know that, at least as of 2021, there were more than..

Continue reading

ICYMI: Icing on the cake

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 4 June 2020.]

Anni Virta and Nelly Virta with their relative Everett Rintala on their 1960 trip to Ohio. Photo courtesy of Antti Virta

“Goodbye Helsinki,” Anni Virta wrote in July 1960, “our trip..

Continue reading

ICYMI: Selecting images for a family history

[Editor's note: This post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 5 April 2019.]

My late mother-in-law, with her father, in 1927.

How do you choose photos for a family history? Someone recently asked me that excellent question. She happened to have dozens, if not..

Continue reading

ICYMI: Rules of engagement

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 18 January 2019.]

Like Alicia Crane Williams, I have been inspired by the fifth anniversary of Vita Brevis to think about the writing of essays. When I first began contributing to this blog, I wasn’t..

Continue reading

Icing on the cake

Anni Virta and Nelly Virta with their relative Everett Rintala on their 1960 trip to Ohio. Photo courtesy of Antti Virta

“Goodbye Helsinki,” Anni Virta wrote in July 1960, “our trip to the west has started and the point of the dream has become a reality.” Anni was a..

Continue reading

Selecting images for a family history

My late mother-in-law, with her father, in 1927.

How do you choose photos for a family history? Someone recently asked me that excellent question. She happened to have dozens, if not hundreds, of photos and didn’t know how to start. I had never really come up with..

Continue reading

Rules of engagement

Like Alicia Crane Williams, I have been inspired by the fifth anniversary of Vita Brevis to think about the writing of essays. When I first began contributing to this blog, I wasn’t sure if I really had anything to say – and, if I did, whether I could say it within the..

Continue reading

Finding Lempi's ring

Juho Matalamäki outside his house in Teuva, Finland.

Sometime in 2014 in eastern Finland, Toivo “Topi” Pränny was researching his great-great-grandfather, Juho Matalamäki. As a boy, Topi lived in what was once Juho’s house and had heard many stories about him,..

Continue reading

Modern-day melting pots

A loaf of nisu

“How is your celebration of the holiday influenced by previous generations?” asked a recent survey in The Weekly Genealogist. The first item in the list of answer choices was “I serve food or drinks that are traditional in my family.“ I quickly..

Continue reading

The genealogist's friend

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..

Continue reading