Vita Brevis

Three more sketches (16 pages) in the Early New England Families Study Project have just been posted – John Carter of Woburn; Samuel Maverick of Noddles Island, Boston, Maine, New York, etc.; and his wife Amyas (Cole) (Thomson) Maverick.

John Carter is the first..

For the past six months, I have been devoting much of my time as Metadata Librarian at NEHGS to making older genealogies from our Boston research library available online..

[Editor’s note: Katrina Fahy has written a number of posts on researching her Scottish, Irish, and German ancestors. Some of her techniques – and successes – are excerpted below.]

From Finding William Muir: When I began working as a genealogist, my mother expressed..

I find that, once I start collecting something, the collection itself tends to dictate its own expansion. Put another way, I don’t always know what will interest me until I start looking at the items on either side of the object I..

Coming from a family of active amateur photographers, the (still) new digital age of photography has significantly changed the way I look at and convey my world, its events, my life, and my family. Gone are the days of, “Oh, no, I just..

There are many stories that reside in the papers and photographs our forebears set aside to keep. These stories sometimes lack a key, but here is one that, thanks to a loving sister, retains its general outline.

We are just about to start the fourth year of the Early New England Families Study Project. There are presently 72 sketches online, and now the first of the hard copy publications covering 50 families is available as well. New sketches scheduled to be uploaded in..

On the first day of 2016, Vita Brevis can boast 780,157 page views over the life of the blog. With dozens of voices writing for the blog, I hope that readers will check back often to see what’s new at Vita Brevis. Following yesterday’s blog post, here follows a..

Vita Brevis recently marked a milestone, with the publication of its five-hundredth blog post. Early in January 2016, the blog will celebrate its second birthday, and, in a tradition started last year, today and tomorrow I will..

A happy discovery in my genealogical research was the online availability of deeds for the state of Maine. The Maine Registers..