Vita Brevis

This post marks the two-hundredth entry on Vita Brevis since its début on January 10. After ten months and more than 250,000 page..

While visiting the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston recently, I took the opportunity to look at their collection titled Charitable Irish Society Records...

There was no light-bulb moment when I discovered I wanted to be a genealogist, but by the time I came back from Kentucky, I’d done enough work on my family’s genealogy to decide history wasn’t so dull after all. It happened that NEHGS was hiring an assistant editor for..

As a researcher, I most enjoy looking through collections of personal papers. For me, seeing what items still exist is just as interesting as finding the data they contain. I have gone through family papers that I was told were “junk” and found information that I would..

The recent death of the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire got me to thinking about the genealogical treatment of titles. Titles can be tricky, and many American genealogists..

Throughout my childhood and teenage years I was under the impression that my ancestors had traveled to Plymouth on the Mayflower. Being young and naive, I had no reason to question my parents’ long-held beliefs. Given that my grandfather, Henry Hornblower II..

Last week, I was happily recalling my 2012 trip to Finland, specifically a visit to my ancestral village, Teuva. I had the great good luck to meet cousins there and see the land that my ancestors farmed – and even the foundation of the tiny house where my grandmother..

I am the last woman in six generations of my umbilical line (which is as far back as I’ve been able to trace). My mother’s mother, Alice Mason Crane, for whom I was named (I was going to be Alice, too, but Gram didn’t want to be called “Big Alice”), inherited..

Middlesex County was created on 10 May 1643 as one of the original four counties of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The other original counties were Essex, Suffolk, and a now..

This past weekend, about twenty-five of my Boucher cousins gathered to tour the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s show, “Making Music: The Banjo in Baltimore and Beyond,” with its three curators. Our visit to the BMI likely marked the first large-scale reunion of the..