Vita Brevis

About three months ago, I was contacted by a man hoping I could help track down some information about someone in my family tree.

“I found something interesting about a possible past relative of yours named Helen Elizabeth Wilson. I found her in a Cornell University..

Last week the New York City Municipal Archives revealed a new online platform where anyone around the world can now access full color scans of more than 9 million historic New York City vital records. The collection encompasses birth, marriage, and death records from..

Following up on my earlier post on the Roosevelt family, I noted that Presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt’s kinship by marriage was the closer way they connected, as their closest kinship by blood was..

There was no mention of Emily. No mention of her in any yellowed letters or penciled-in pedigrees, or in any “clippings” of scandal or gossip. Indeed, the only snippet of her was as a young girl “with ague” found among census records. There she was, “Emily A. Ginder”..

Working on the Early New England Families sketch for George Parkhurst of Watertown, I find myself deep in the middle of three marriages, a total of fourteen children, financial destitution, and return to England. If you are a descendant of George Parkhurst, you may not..

Okay, so this post will be a bit of rant mixed with some fun genealogy. Last year, a great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt asked for my assistance in making a chart to demonstrate the mildly complicated nature of the presidents’ maternal grandparents and their..

I have worked on some challenging research cases lately that involved trying to prove Mayflower lines. While I am well versed in creating proof summaries for cases that don’t have cut and dried evidence,..

I am continually struck by the effects of happenstance in genealogy. Because I was putting together notes on my grandmother’s family, I went looking for a source on the Gates family of..

As much of the recent news has regarded the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I thought I would post on a distant Ukrainian ancestor of mine, Anne of Kiev, an ancestor to millions of people with western European ancestry whose siblings are ancestral to millions of eastern..

Reading Chris Child’s last post inspired me to look at some of my own patriotic connections among ye olde branches. Unfortunately, most of what I find are the same mythic characters and stories I’ve..