Vita Brevis

It’s St. Patrick’s Day! What better time to review NEHGS resources — both in print and online — that can help you research your Irish ancestors? Irish research offers particular challenges, largely owing to the destruction of many records in a 1922 fire at the Public..

Family historians use a variety of records, some of which require some understanding of legal terms. And when it comes to land records, one term that is very often misunderstood..

I’m in the middle of doing some research for a lecture that I’ll be giving in April at NEHGS entitled “The..

Do you have an ancestor from New Hampshire who was working at sea at the young age of 10 or 12? Have you seen a U.S. Federal Census record that states that your ancestor was a “mariner” at age..

The role of women in America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not confined simply to matters within their households, as some have..

Can we agree on something? Can we agree not to form plurals with apostrophes?

Now this may not seem like a genealogical topic, but making plurals does come up in genealogy, because it comes up in all writing. And sometimes in family histories we need to make plurals of..

In the years after the American Civil War, an influx of immigrants from Scandinavia settled in the United States. Pushed from their homelands by famine, overpopulation, and..

One day while visiting my parents, I looked through some documents that belonged to my maternal grandmother, Gertrude Rose (Breen) Conlon. She lived with my family for two years until her death in 1992, and my mother..

After a week of researching in Washington, D.C., with the NEHGS tour, one of the many things I have learned is that genealogy is more of a sport than a hobby. It takes physical and mental strength and endurance to pursue the..

As a librarian at NEHGS, I love stumbling across items in our research library collection that bring the past to life in an unexpected way. I recently had one such happy “stumbling” experience when we discovered a work called ..