Vita Brevis

One of the recent exciting changes at NEHGS has been the addition of an exhibit on 2020. Visitors to our headquarters at 99–101 Newbury Street have surely noticed the two major outdoor exhibit elements: a Wampanoag mother and..

De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum. Since learning this saying in high school Latin class – “Of the dead, say nothing unless good” – I have heeded it as good advice for writing family history. If anything, many past genealogists exaggerate the virtues of..

As I work at reconstructing the environment in which the Livingstons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lived, I have been struck by the frequency with which I have encountered members of the Menteith family. (It is fair to..

(Author’s note: The following is an interpretive account of the life of Leah Ann Rickards (ca. 1836–1913), my great-great-grandfather John Henry O. Record’s sister. This account is presented in three parts, and is based on..

Three new sketches have been uploaded to the Early New England Families database for Tristram Coffin, his mother, and one of his sisters.

Tristram Coffin, age 32, and his wife Dionis (Stevens) Coffin, about the same age, brought their five children – ranging in age..

As I continue to map out the connections of the Livingston family of Callendar, Stirlingshire, I am struck by how comparatively closely related the sixteenth-century Livingston family was to two of the..

[Editor's note: This blog post first appeared in Vita Brevis on 20 March 2017.]

Following up on correcting the charts in my Seeing double blog post, the chart showing my ancestor Anna (Salisbury) Slade was a recent disappointment and involved removing some ancestors..

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 22 May 2017.]

I recently traveled to Michigan to watch my cousin, Scott, graduate from Michigan State University (Go Spartans!) with a law degree. And like any good..

In reviewing some late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century marriages in the Livingston family in Scotland, I was struck by a pair of alliances that must have been important to the Livingstons of that era. This review also underlined..

As pioneers migrate from one area to another, they often find that circumstances require changes in the way they do things. One such example involves a pioneer named John Deere. You may be familiar with the name as being associated with the manufacture of tractors and..