The New York Times Magazine recently published a story on the ancestry of the new Pope. The article was by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in collaboration with American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami. I was one of the researchers tasked with working on some of..

1897 map of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, Matthews-Northrup Company (via Wikimedia Commons)

One “employment perk” at American Ancestors is a complementary consultation with one of our genealogists, and every now and then I get paired with a colleague for such..

I recently met with the widow of my father’s first cousin Dexter, who died in 2022, to look over some family documents. I had already seen and scanned most of these items, sharing them with relatives through online cloud storage. One item which I hadn’t seen before is..

Cannons at Cheatham Hill, Kennesaw Mountain battle site, Georgia

Several lineage societies exist related to service in the American Civil War. These are, as you might imagine, divided by side—some relate to descendants of Union soldiers, others Confederate. Some men..

Photo of Taylor Swift by Cosmopolitan UK; photo of Travis Kelce by Erik Drost. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The Kansas City Chiefs are going to the Super Bowl again soon, as they have three times out of the last four years. Their appearances in 2021 and 2023 prompted two..

Our summer issue of the Mayflower Descendant includes an article by myself and Michael Leclerc..

The upcoming summer issue of the Mayflower Descendant includes an interesting article by Mark Wentling entitled “Joseph Brownell (1699-ca. 1773) of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and Little Compton, Rhode Island:..

I read two stories of interest in a recent issue of The Woodstock Villager, a local newspaper from my grandfather’s Connecticut hometown. The first story (on page A3) concerned a Witness..

A few months ago, I chaperoned my daughter’s school field trip to the Paul Revere House in Boston’s North End. I had previously visited this house several times over the course of five..

This post is a collaboration between myself and Vita-Brevis contributor Jeff Record , as we were both watching Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal on Netflix, as well as news coverage of the recent murder trial of Alex Murdaugh . Jeff alerted me to a possible Mayflower