Category Archives: African-american-research

Researching the Negro Baseball Leagues

Courtesy of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum

Baseball is back! As someone who has always loved baseball, I could not be more excited to see the players return to the diamond. Although the game might not look exactly like it did last year, these differences simply..

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South Carolina leaders

Montage created in 1876 showing the "Radical Members" of the South Carolina Legislature. (Click on images to expand them.) Courtesy of facinghistory.org

I recently watched comedian Dave Chappelle's powerful Netflix special 8:46, remarking on the death of George..

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Reflections on Researching Racism in America

Thomas Bivins Probate Inventory (1857), Marion, Inventories and appraisements 1852-1904, "Georgia, Probate Records, 1742-1990," FamilySearch.

I have agonized over what I would say in a blog post that would speak to the gravity of where our nation is today. I..

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2019: the year in review

In January 2019, Vita Brevis marked its fifth anniversary with a series of posts, among them one on the blog “By the numbers.” After listing a number of statistics about the blog to that point, I made the following comments:

[But] Vita Brevis is more than the numbers,..

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The ancestry of Archie Mountbatten-Windsor

Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh following the Queen's coronation in 1953. Photo by Cecil Beaton, courtesy of Wikipedia.org

The birth of the newest member of the British royal family affords the chance to review all of young Archie Mountbatten-Windsor’s..

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Well played

The last surviving windmill on Nantucket (ca. 1746) is also the oldest operational mill in the United States. It is mentioned in one of Cato Cary’s deeds.

In my very first post for Vita Brevis, I mentioned that I’d learned a wonderful tip from NEHGS staff: many..

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Sold for a song

“You know, there is a shortage of beautiful, old theaters left in this country and this is one of them…” – Daryl Hall

At some point during the first decade of 2000s, I went to see Hall and Oates at the Orpheum Theater in Boston. They were on a tour to promote a..

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Curiouser and curiouser

The interior side of the Hancock Mansion’s front door, preserved in the Massachusetts Old Statehouse. This is the side that Cato Hancock would have known well.

I truly went down a rabbit hole recently, and all the credit goes to NEHGS’s Chief Genealogist, David..

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2018: the year in review

As we begin the countdown for 2019 – and look forward to the blog’s fifth anniversary in January – I have selected some posts from the first half of 2018 to showcase the range of subjects covered in Vita Brevis during the last year.

Alicia Crane Williams started the..

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Challenging modern records

A record generated for Meghan Markle's great-grandmother.

In my post earlier this year, regarding preliminary research into the future Duchess of Sussex's matrilineal ancestry, I indicated that I had ordered several additional twentieth-century records that might..

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