Vita Brevis

NEHGS is always looking to acquire family trees to add to our collection. They come to us..

The Early New England Families Study Project has been well received, and I have already had a number of offers from generous individuals who wish to share their research with the project.  I do appreciate the offers, really, but I have to politely decline.

Genealogy is often a solitary pursuit, and increasingly, one that is conducted primarily online. Last week, NEHGS welcomed 26 members and supporters to our research library in Boston for a program..

I am currently at work processing the Farley Family Papers, a large collection that includes hundreds of letters, photographs, estate records, and military records created by several generations of Farleys in Massachusetts. The wide variety of documents found in the..

Many of us have been betrayed, genealogically speaking, by a source that appears to be reliable but is not. Often the source is reliable for the most part. But that..

When I was in school thirty plus years ago, there was a lot of discussion about the differences between history and genealogy – usually with genealogy getting the short end of the stick. The gap between historians and genealogists narrowed once we realized that we all..

A current research preoccupation of mine is a photo of my maternal grandfather, Arthur David Belforti (born Achille Alessio Riccardo Belforti, 1902-1996), which my mother recently gave me and which is pictured here. Having had a..

Although many Eastern Massachusetts colonial families have been well covered in print, the sons and daughters of those families who moved west are often lost to genealogists. The first stop on their migratory path was often in the woods of Western Massachusetts.

In..

Have you wished that you could use NEHGS library resources from home?  Have you wondered where to find copies of genealogies online?  You can do this by starting with the NEHGS library catalog. Staff and dedicated volunteers have been working to add links to freely..

I frequently encounter eighteenth- or nineteenth-century dates, especially on the migration trail, that are not cited and which often derive from “online trees,” usually the FamilySearch Ancestral File, Rootsweb WorldConnect, or Ancestry World Tree. These days, I find..