For as long as I’ve had my present office on the Society’s third floor, I’ve looked through my open door at a portrait of George Bruce Upton (1804–1874), the Society’s vice president between 1866 and 1874. I will..

I recently bid on a photograph associated with a 1938 Cecil B. DeMille film called The Buccaneer, and noticed that the seller identified the man in the picture – the actor Fredric March (1897–1975) – but not the woman: a search at The..

For the last six months or so, I have been engrossed in the daily diary of Hedwiga Regina (Shober) Gray (1818–1885), a Philadelphia-born Boston lady who wrote about..

Every so often it seems worthwhile to look back over the wide range of Vita Brevis posts and bring some related ones together in one spot. Now that we are half way through the calendar year, some..

In my last post on photographs, I wrote about three unknown subjects who sat for some of the leading Hollywood photographers of the day, and readers weighed in with suggestions..

A number of years ago I read a passage in a book on the British aristocracy that has stayed with me, a passage having little to do with peers and their families and quite a lot to do with how we..

Back in October I wrote about a mysterious photo in my collection of Hollywood photographs, one taken by Eugene Robert Richee of a plainly-dressed woman wearing a rather splendid hat. Photographer and studio names are given on the back,..

In the small world department, one of my closest friends growing up still lives near my parents on the North Shore of Boston. We grew up hearing our parents and grandparents call each other cousin, but no one could readily sort out the connection – in our case, it was..

When I was born, I had two living great-grandmothers. The elder was my matrilineal great-grandmother, Pauline (Boucher) Glidden (1875–1964), whom I never had the chance to meet; the other was my paternal grandmother’s..

One of the mysteries of the Regina Shober Gray diary is why it came to be part of the NEHGS collection. It is an account of daily (or weekly) life, written between..