Vita Brevis

This is a tale of how curiosity, knowledge of local Italian sources and conditions, and focused research strategies uncovered an error in church records and solved a genealogical mystery. Last year I..

The news of the recent death of Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr., aged 95, grandson of 10th U.S. President John Tyler (1790-1862), leaves just his younger brother, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, aged 91, as the last grandchild of a..

As I work on a genealogy of the Livingston family in Scotland and America, I am roughing out appendices covering..

What does it take to build a monument, a lasting legacy, to the First Landing of the Pilgrims in Provincetown? Determination and persistence and, of course, money, not to mention years of territorial..

Finishing up this series on places my family enjoyed during our socially distant summer, I move now from the North Shore to the South Shore, to “World’s End” in Hingham. This Trustees property was designed by the well-known landscape..

My surname comes down to me from a ten-generation line of Grovers, all of whom have lived in America. The first in this line is Edmund Grover (1600-1682), who emigrated from England to the Massachusetts Bay..

My prior post on my own matrilineal ancestry and merged names continues with my father’s matrilineal line. My paternal grandmother’s parents were both natives of Philadelphia, and she recorded many of her..

Proof that fears and concerns still prevail six months after the country was plunged into lockdown, isolation and quarantine could be found in the empty streets of Plymouth on the day that eager Mayflower descendants and philatelists should have been lining up for the..

To continue my look at outdoor spots my family enjoyed this socially distant summer, I now will talk about Appleton Farms in Ipswich and Hamilton, not too far from the Crane Estate. The Trustees website describes Appleton farm as the “gift of Colonel Francis R...

Okay. Let’s clear something up straight away. Like the rest of us here, I see dead people.^[1] The truth is, though, that “my visions” aren’t always very clear, and..