[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 6 January 2020.]
For whatever reason, my grandmother’s ancestors stayed put. They ignored the call to go west (“young man!”) or to secure the nation’s manifest destiny...
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[Author's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 20 November 2019.]
As I work at reconstructing the environment in which the Livingstons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lived, I have been struck by the..
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Now that a few of our shelter-in-place orders have been lifted, my wife Nancy and I have started to get back to the more ‘normal’ side of life. I have to admit, it’s been pretty nice not having to treat toilet paper like some new form of..
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[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 28 April 2020.]
While I was researching and writing “The Early..
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For much of the eighteenth century, the political landscape of Rhode Island was shaped by a single family. Between 1732 and 1775, four descendants of Edward Wanton served as the governor of the Colony of..
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Watching the videos of Mayflower II being escorted through the Cape Cod Canal brings weird thoughts to my mind. What if there had been a canal in 1620? Would “Plimoth Plantation” have been “Long Island Plantation”? Things would have been different, but since there was..
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My grandfather[1] came from New York, and when I was growing up it was understood that the Stewards were from New York and the Ayers (my grandmother’s family) were from Boston. A little..
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Whenever I find myself doing Massachusetts research that predates 1800, I return to a collection of early town plans, 1794-1795, that are as much a documentary source as they..
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When I “hand-off” a genealogical manuscript, it can be some time before the work is handed back to me with queries from the copyeditor. Occasionally in that time, more resources may emerge (or become more accessible), and my own..
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