Vita Brevis

If your family is anything like mine, you heard plenty of stories about your great-grandparents from your parents. From those stories I have been able to get a sense of their personalities and how they lived, but it is a view limited to how my parents knew them as..

Here at NEHGS, we are always on the lookout for interesting genealogical books, pedigrees, or other formats for documenting family history. One of my first blog posts here covered the Society’s acquisition of a fascinating (and literal) family tree showing all of Queen..

Tracing one’s family back to their country of origin can be daunting; often the birthplaces found on census records are just countries, with no indication given of province or..

When I began working as a genealogist, my mother expressed great interest in learning more about her father’s family: the Muirs. While she had much information on her mother’s side..

For the past several years NEHGS has been giving seminars on writing and publishing a family history. These have been very popular, and as a result, Penny Stratton and I refocused the two previous NEHGS writing guides to reflect the contents of the seminars. The..

Readers have asked for Early New England Families Study Project sketches for the ladies. Because genealogy is traditionally oriented to the male surname – and if a wife has only one husband – “reversing” his sketch for her would not include any more information. With..

Anyone who has researched genealogy knows that names can be spelled many different ways across a variety of records. I once found twelve different spellings of one family’s surname during a research project here at NEHGS. Recently, in my own personal family research,..

There is much serendipity in genealogy: more than once I have pulled a book off the shelf in the library at NEHGS, intrigued by the title or perhaps the binding, only to find within its covers the answer to a vexing research question or a story that sheds light on a..

Among my husband’s family papers is a letter, dated 25 October 1873, from John Dill to his mother, Susan (Berry) (Dill) Gibbons. John had left the family home in Springfield, Illinois, earlier that year to work on the railroad in Texas, and he was..

No document is more pivotal to genealogical work than a death certificate. The reason for its importance goes far beyond simply..