Vita Brevis

October is a magical month when the leaves turn brilliant colors and start decorating the ground as the nights get cooler and darker. No wonder it is a time filled with hearty food, hot cider, and spooky stories told..

I am currently helping to research the ancestry of Dame Angela Lansbury for an event NEHGS will hold in November, and part of my work..

Since coming to work at NEHGS,..

I’ll be blunt: J.K. Rowling is my favorite author. I’ve read (and reread) all of her books, watched her interviews (including an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?), and I follow her on Twitter and Facebook. She has..

A little while back, my mother gave me several pins which had belonged to her mother. One of them was a badge for the American Women's Voluntary Services (AWVS), an organization established in 1940 that provided aid and assistance to the American armed forces and..

My regular trip from Plymouth up to Duxbury this week was a pleasant, sunny autumnal drive. I wasn’t exactly tracing my ancestors’ footsteps, since I went up Route 3. (If they had gone overland, their trail would be closer to what is now Route..

Some family stories are so fascinating and memorable that they are passed down through multiple generations, becoming a well-known piece of lore; others, while equally interesting, get lost in the shuffle. The latter truism might..

I will be out of the office today, attending a planning meeting for the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (NERFC) at the John Hay Library in Providence. The New England Historic Genealogical Society..

Given that the British peerage system developed over time, its labyrinthine rules and unfamiliar nomenclature are not all that surprising. As feudal peerages – a somewhat amorphous class bound by land..

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..