Vita Brevis

Years ago, Jeff Record sent me an ahnentafel report on his ancestry, curious to see if we had any connections back in Kansas. While we identified several common ancestors in New England, I was curious about his..

On a glorious early fall day, with a plan to gather myself a small fistful of forget-me-nots blooming along the town brook and revisit some of the landmarks that I wrote about last year in my Outdoor Classroom posts, we took a ride to Plymouth. As this Pilgrim “first..

We all have them, those ancestors who seem to fade into the long-ago background of family history. Perhaps they’re not even our relatives, just names heard frequently but without context, or in a wedding guest book, a newspaper column, or in an obituary. The figures..

After having the illustrated Teams conversation with a colleague (which did continue with me giving details), I thought I would accomplish my dream of writing a post in under one hundred words, one that would prompt longer comments than the 61 words of the original..

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 24 November 2014.]

When I was a child, I became very interested in family history. At the unusual age of seven, the stories of my forebears were more fascinating than the..

“This is war, Peacock. Casualties are inevitable. You can not make an omelet without breaking eggs, every cook will tell you that.”

~ Martin Mull, in the role of Colonel Mustard in Clue (1985)

When my mother started down the genealogy trail many decades ago, my grandfather was quick to tell her about the famous World War II flying ace in the family, related through his aunt, Nancy Alice (Christy) Carl. She had..

Many years ago, now, I visited a cousin outside Baltimore with the marvelous name of Camille Steward Marié (1918-2002).[1] He was the son of one of my great-grandfather’s first cousins, but because of the way our..

[Editor's note: To date, 995 blog posts in the category of "American History" have been published at Vita Brevis. Herewith the first, published 15 January 2014.]

I cannot imagine the faith that John Leverett and his wives, Hannah Hudson and Sarah Sedgwick, must have..