Vita Brevis

There are any number of reference books with information about when and how the towns of Massachusetts were incorporated. One is Historical Data Relating to Counties, Cities, and Towns in Massachusetts, by Paul Guzzi, Secretary of the Commonwealth, published in 1975...

[Author’s note: This series of excerpts from Regina Shober Gray’s diary began here.]

Hotel Baus-au..

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 1 April 2015.]

News of King Richard III’s reburial last week was interesting,..

I simply love Register style as a way of presenting descendants of a particular ancestor. Chris Child’s recent post made me realize just how much I love it. It is..

While the variety of televised programs about family history have certainly increased interest in the hobby, I fear that it has begun to supply a skewed approach to genealogical research. So many of these shows show others doing the research for the person, and then..

Yesterday afternoon, sometime after 2 p.m., Vita Brevis marked a major milestone in the life of a blog with its one-millionth page view. Since it officially launched on 10 January 2014, with Robert Charles Anderson’s Deep Puritan Roots post, Vita Brevis has published..

[Author's note: This series of excerpts from Regina Shober Gray’s diary began here.]

In the Early New England Families Study Project sketch for Joseph Andrews of Hingham, I included a commentary about the problem I was having establishing the birth order for Joseph’s children. Recently, an inquirer wondered why I had not used the order the children are..

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 30 March 2015.]

Before I began researching my ancestry, I was overwhelmed by the undertaking. It seemed like an impossible..

In 2014, I wrote a blog post about the greatness that is J.K. Rowling. My main point was that, as in your own..