Vita Brevis

Earlier this year, I read a blog post by the New York Public Library titled “20 Reasons Why You Should Write Your Family History.” Always on the lookout for new ideas to work into our seminars and webinars on writing and publishing, I read it eagerly. One particular..

This may turn out like watching sausage being made or paint dry, but let’s walk through the process of creating an Early New England Families Study Project entry.

We start with the entry from Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700:

NEWTON, Richard (–1701) &..

‪What an amazing opportunity it was to be part of the historic Global Family Reunion held in Queens, New York, on June 6, 2015, where I had the chance to meet NEHGS members, longtime friends and colleagues in the field of..

Thousands are expected to gather on Saturday, June 6, at the New York Hall of Science in Flushing Meadows, Queens, for the very first Global Family Reunion – founded by bestselling author A.J. Jacobs – who describes himself as “father of three, the husband of one, and..

The von Wolfframsdorff Armorial Family Tree

To poke one’s head inside the Conservation Lab here at NEHGS is to observe a beehive of activity. This is where our Conservation Technician Deborah Rossi, part-time interns, and..

In the fall of 2010 I was in the midst of researching and writing the seventh and final volume in the Great Migration second series. The publication of that volume in 2011 would mean that sketches had been published for all Great Migration immigrants from 1620 to 1635,..

Other than Vermont, the five New England states had significant European-derived settlements in the early colonial period. In late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “genealogical dictionaries” were produced for the states of Rhode Island,[1] Massachusetts,[2]..

Collect and compare as many different published versions of the subject as you can. Often there is one old surname genealogy and/or a “dictionary” of settlers. Then there will be some accounts of different branches in some “all-my-ancestors” volumes (often seen in..

I was recently searching The American Genealogist for information and found an article titled “Tradition and Family History.”[1] The article’s opening lines are: “Tradition is a chronic deceiver, and those who put faith in it are self..

When one is raised in Boston, one of the standard field trips in school is to walk the Freedom Trail. How lucky I was. Years later, when a family member moved to Beacon Hill, I became infatuated with this..