Vita Brevis

“Clubbed in Rent Riots”—while digging online for information about my great-great-grandparents, this sensationalistic headline from The Baltimore Sun leapt out of the screen, grabbing my attentionmore than one hundred years after it was first published.

Jill Biden and Stephen Nedoroschik at the 2024 Olympics, Wikimedia Commons

Touro Synagogue from Patriots Park (Photo by author)

You might know Newport, Rhode Island, for its plethora of beautiful and historic mansions, many of which overlook the Atlantic coast. Maybe you know that the city hosted the first U.S. Open Tournaments for both..

Illustration of a home in Freetown, Massachusetts, circa 1895

A barefooted Lucille Coffin, date unknown.

Names are the bedrock of family history research. Finding, sorting, and verifying them takes time. Shared names between generations can cause confusion—such as in the case of professional baseball player Wilmer Flores, whose..

Omaha Beach, 6 June 1944. By Robert F. Sargent

The world will pause today to remember the events in France which occurred eighty years ago during “Operation Overlord”—better remembered as D-Day. Many fine young men would not come home to their families from those..

After my grandfather died, my dad took on the task of cleaning out my grandfather’s closet and saving items to share with the family. Like many closets collecting junk over the years, it contained a mix of useful and useless items, but one unexpected gem caught my..

Ann Martin Appleby and Alexander Appleby: rightful heirs?

When I began looking for documents to fill in details about my New Brunswick ancestors, I had never heard of the DeGrace family fortune. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a will made by the adoptive..

I recently met with the widow of my father’s first cousin Dexter, who died in 2022, to look over some family documents. I had already seen and scanned most of these items, sharing them with relatives through online cloud storage. One item which I hadn’t seen before is..

Undated photo of Charles Anthony Stevens at home (in the family's collection)

In 1886, my great-grandfather Charles Anthony Stevens (1859–1932) opened a small retail shop in Chicago. At first, Chas. A. Stevens sold silk fabrics and notions to local women who made their..