For my 2013 book on the Saltonstall family, I wrote 23 biographical essays on family members, from Gilbert^B Saltonstall (grandfather of the American immigrant) to Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, the legendary Washington Post editor. The Saltonstalls have produced a..

I am currently helping to research the ancestry of Dame Angela Lansbury for an event NEHGS will hold in November, and part of my work..

I will be out of the office today, attending a planning meeting for the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (NERFC) at the John Hay Library in Providence. The New England Historic Genealogical Society..

Given that the British peerage system developed over time, its labyrinthine rules and unfamiliar nomenclature are not all that surprising. As feudal peerages – a somewhat amorphous class bound by land..

This post marks the two-hundredth entry on Vita Brevis since its début on January 10. After ten months and more than 250,000 page..

The recent death of the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire got me to thinking about the genealogical treatment of titles. Titles can be tricky, and many American genealogists..

This past weekend, about twenty-five of my Boucher cousins gathered to tour the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s show, “Making Music: The Banjo in Baltimore and Beyond,” with its three curators. Our visit to the BMI likely marked the first large-scale reunion of the..

Here at NEHGS, we are always on the lookout for interesting genealogical books, pedigrees, or other formats for documenting family history. One of my first blog posts here covered the Society’s acquisition of a fascinating (and literal) family tree showing all of Queen..

There is much serendipity in genealogy: more than once I have pulled a book off the shelf in the library at NEHGS, intrigued by the title or perhaps the binding, only to find within its covers the answer to a vexing research question or a story that sheds light on a..

When I started out as a genealogical writer, I followed the model of genealogies published earlier in the twentieth century. The genealogical world they depicted was an orderly one, with generation after generation born in one place, married in another,..