Vita Brevis

[Editor’s note: Alicia’s probate series began here.]

Appointment of appraisers

On the same day that the letter of administration and bond were made, 4 April 1787, the judge appointed three men to take the inventory of Joseph Alden’s estate: Joshua White, Esq., Seth..

[Author's note: This post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 3 September 2014.]

When I started out as a genealogical writer, I followed the model of genealogies published earlier in the twentieth century. The genealogical world they depicted was an orderly one, with..

Genealogy is the never-ending story of your ancestors as you track them down and learn about the lives they lived. It is also the opportunity to learn about the communities in which they resided. Recently, I had the opportunity to..

My review of almost sixty years’ worth of Baltimore city directories has yielded much information on my great-great-great-grandfather E. W. Boucher; my great-great-grandfather William Boucher Jr. (1822–1899) and his two wives; and many of..

Often, when I’m looking at records on FamilySearch.org, I find source records in two categories: 1) “Browsable” (images only, no searching capability), or 2) “Searchable” (abstracted with various fields from the record). Sometimes,..

Douglas Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry isn’t a particularly old or rare volume, but it is a frequently used resource in our collections. This massive reference book tracks family lines between medieval England and colonial America, making it a valuable source of..

[Editor’s note: Alicia’s series began here.]

Intestate probate

For this exercise we will use the records from both the files of the Plymouth County Probate Court (i.e., images of the original documents) and from the copy books. The original files for Plymouth County..

[Editor's note: This post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 22 August 2014.]

Now that my book on genealogical research methods (Elements of Genealogical Analysis) is out, I have turned my attention to the series of lectures I will be delivering in October and..

The recent gift of some family photos reminds me that, well as in some ways I knew my maternal grandfather, there will always be things one cannot know, save by lucky chance. My grandfather was..

As we are missing (most of) the 1890 Federal Census, the value of city directories for the years around 1890 is all the greater. Looking at the Boucher family of Baltimore, the 1880s proved somewhat chaotic, with the family shop and..