Over-egging the pudding

A view of St. Bartholomew's Church in Groton, Suffolk.

I wear several hats at NEHGS. In addition to editing Vita Brevis, I am the Society’s Editor-in-Chief, with advisory roles in the Publications, Library, and Website divisions; I write and edit books, including a..

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Journaling

Has anyone else gotten into the new analog journaling craze? Often called “Bullet Journaling,” it is a return to the old, handwritten method of keeping records. There are many templates that can be followed, but the Bullet Journal (BuJo) is intended to be thoroughly..

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'A free citizen'

Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
[ Author's note: This series, on Mrs. Gray's reading habits, began here.]

By the winter of 1861, an American civil war loomed. Regina Shober Gray[1] – a native of Pennsylvania with Southern..

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A Loyalist history lesson

One of the delightful things about genealogy is that it often leads us to learn, and re-learn, our history lessons in unexpected ways.

I have struggled for many years trying to find any New York documents on my immigrant ancestor John LeClear. He came from France..

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Shorthand systems

From Alfred Janes, Standard Stenography: Being Taylor's Shorthand (1882), courtesy of Google Books.

One day, when searching through the town records of New Haven, Connecticut, I was struck by one of the entries. The writing appeared like nothing I had ever seen..

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The Great Baltimore Fire

Click on the images to expand them.

In February 1904, the Great Fire of Baltimore raged for two days, burning much of downtown. It was a devastating disaster that helped prompt standardization and reform in the firefighting industry. A month later, my..

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Creative dating

I think about genealogy for much of my day. Therefore, on a recent trip to Boston’s Museum of Science, I was again thinking about how I could apply something that I learned that day to make me a better genealogist. Thankfully, the Museum has a new(er) exhibit that is..

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Your questions answered

The Asa Williams House, ca. 1912

Sometimes we all, like Tennessee Williams, depend on the kindness of strangers – whether we realize it or not. While I’ve always shared my family research and stories, it has been only recently that I’ve come to understand how..

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The Parson Capen House

The Parson Capen House sits in the historic section of Topsfield, Massachusetts, a charming New England town about 30 miles north of Boston. It is quite remarkable that this minister’s home has survived nearly unchanged since the seventeenth century. Visitors can walk..

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Phantoms and red herrings

Bob Anderson has a “Phantom File” at the end of his Great Migration Begins series (3: 2097–2104), with names that have been misread or misconstrued (e.g., John Allen for John Alden), meaning that no real person by the mistaken name existed.

An example of a phantom in..

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