Vita Brevis

The AJHS–NEA archives are filled with stories of individuals and families who have affected the Jewish communities of Greater Boston and New England. Eliot Snider is the focus of one  such collection.

Four years before Eliot was born, his father – Harry, a Jewish..

Patrilineage

One of my sisters recently asked me if we might be related to a friend of hers named Boucher, and I explained that we almost certainly were not, as the surname died out with our great-great-aunt Florence Estella Boucher..

Why most people went to Charlestown during the seventeenth century we can only guess. Individuals were usually far too occupied during preparation, emigration, and plantation to record their reasons for undertaking this life-threatening ordeal. We can only adduce..

The life of Percy Brand, whose papers are held by the American Jewish Historical Society–New England Archives, sounds like a plot from a movie. Born Peretz Brand in Liepaja, Latvia, in 1908, Brand began studying violin when he was ten years old. By the time he was 33,..

I own some shares in mutual funds and have a basic understanding of the stock market, but I am in no way, shape, or form the person you want to talk to about investing your money. When I am trying to figure out how to invest my money, I face the same kind of..

As I prepare for this week’s Writing and Publishing Seminar in Boston, I am reflecting on that challenging moment for genealogists when research gives way to writing. It’s important, at this stage, to begin thinking about the potential article or book as something..

The “Great Migration” of as many as 20,000 people to New England during the 1630s was, in its long-term effects, the most important event in English seventeenth-century history. It has been depicted as a farther-reaching extension of an already mobile English..

My cousin Connie recently sent me a photo of a young woman and asked me if I thought it might show her grandmother (and my great-great-aunt) Constance Boucher Burch (1887–1977). I’m inclined to think it does, given the provenance as well as the (rather unscientific)..

It is amazing to realize that the Great Migration Study Project is twenty-five years old.  Part of my fifteen seconds of fame is that I was in the room when Great Migration Begins was chosen as the title for the first series of books! It is nice to see how many new..

Samuel Gardner Drake was not a likely candidate to become the author of a multitude of historical works. Born on a farm in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, in 1798, he was not an eager pupil in his youth. “His aversion to school, when a little urchin,” as John H. Sheppard..