Vita Brevis

Our house has lots of dusty boxes that came from the houses of deceased family members. There’s the box of stuff from my father’s bachelor brother, William “Bud” Buzzell, who served on an LST during World War II and who sold me my first car for a dollar. There are..

Another way to assess a genealogy is to consider the “scope” of its content. Few genealogies trace all descendants of a seventeenth-century New England couple through male and female lines to the present: just ask the Mayflower Society about their “Five Generations”..

Before the internet and the digitization of some Irish records, one needed patience, persistence, and problem-solving skills to connect the lives of Irish immigrants here..

Last year I wrote about the family register that I was given detailing the family of my great-great-great-grandparents Robert Thompson (1795–1854) and his third wife Emma Russell (1808–1872) of Industry, Maine. I mentioned in the..

“In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die: Ever drifting down the stream – Lingering in the golden gleam – Life, what is it but a dream?”– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

My mother is dying today. She is..

I love it when other genealogists give me a hand. This past weekend someone from San Diego kindly alerted me to an eBay auction for an old Imperial Cabinet-sized photograph. Someone had thoughtfully labeled the people in the photograph years ago, and they all appear in..

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 22 April 2016.]

Genealogists and historians of Massachusetts are indebted to the works of..

[This series on royal cartes de visite began here.]

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert viewed Prussia as their ideal among the multitude of German kingdoms,..

The benefits of newspaper databases when conducting family research can be remarkable. One usually hopes to find valuable birth, marriage, and death notices, or, if you’re lucky, an interesting detail you may not be able to glean from..

Enlarging on last week’s topic about Peer Review, it is always best to know who is who in any industry. The industry of genealogical research goes back almost 200 years, so that covers a lot of “Whos,” but here are some lists to help:

The American Society of..