Vita Brevis

After a whirlwind time in Salt Lake City for RootsTech 2014, the NEHGS web team is back in Boston. This year's conference felt like a big step up from last year's (moving into the larger half of the Salt Palace) without seeming overwhelming, although I personally..

My winter social schedule was enlivened recently with a talk given by one of my favorite speakers, Peg Baker of Plymouth. She and her husband, Jim Baker, are well known for their vast expertise in all things Pilgrim. Peg is Director Emeritus of The Pilgrim Society in..

For more than seventy years the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire – compiled by Charles Thornton Libby, Walter Goodwin Davis, and Sybil Noyes, and published between 1928 and 1938 – has been the first recourse for those looking to trace their..

The first two days of RootsTech have gone by in a blur, and it has been a pleasure to get to meet so many members in person and match faces to email addresses! I hope that more of you will come by to say hello at booth #926.

While for many you this will be the second..

In his 1693 will, Richard Martyn of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, directed that all the books his third wife “brought with her to my house” be returned to her. Curiosity sent me off on a tangent (it doesn’t take much to distract me) to see if I could identify those books..

NEHGS recently bought a luxuriant “genealogical tree” chart* of Queen Victoria and her descendants, published for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in June 1897. The chart, removed from the issue of The Graphic dated 26 June 1897, was at one time in the collection of the..

John Camden Hotten first published The Original Lists of Persons of Quality – his compilation of documents relating to seventeenth-century migration to New England, the Chesapeake, and the Caribbean – more than a century and a quarter ago, and it remains one of our..

Next week brings the first big genealogical conference of 2014, with RootsTech in Salt Lake City from February 6–8. I'll be there with some of my colleagues from NEHGS, and we hope to meet a number of you there!

We’ve been attending the conference since it started in..

What to us might seem a rather morbid seventeenth-century tradition was the bestowal of mourning gifts on those who took part in your funeral, such as the coffin bearers, as well as family and friends. Samuel Sewall made a list of thirty funerals at which he was a..

To be complete, the well-stocked genealogical library should include general works on our research interests. Biographical dictionaries and other compendia are useful for looking at our ancestors’ contemporaries and their activities; they often provide clues for..