What drew me to genealogy was the idea that my family could have been part of a major historical event. When you learn about history in school, the different events – whether it be the Holocaust, the French Revolution, or the English Civil War – always seem to be so..

When Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton premiered on Disney+, I enjoyed watching the musical with my family. (My seven-year-old daughter’s favorite character was King George III!) This prompted me to..

I recently discovered an online app. that allows me to scan my photographs. As I like to be able to refer to a record of my collection (still somewhat maddening if I forget the subject’s name), this has been a revelation. One of the vernacular photos I bought some time..

One of the features of this anniversary year – the four hundredth since the Mayflower’s landing at Plymouth as well as the 175th anniversary of the Society’s founding in 1845 – has been a focus on early members of the Society, people no one alive today can have known...

Another trove in my grandfather’s box of family papers is a stack of canceled passports. Most of them are for my grandfather, ranging from the 1950s into the 1980s, but one – a handsome little book, containing a parchment that folds out to four times the stored size –..

[Editor's note: The following blog post appeared in Vita Brevis on 6 December 2019.]

Having been occupied with a project these last few months, not only have I been away from Vita Brevis for far too long, but I’ve allowed issues of the Weekly Genealogist to pile up in..

A 4th of July post on Facebook shared the above image quoting John Quincy Adams of The Order of the Founders and Patriots of America, which was founded in 1896. A friend of mine thought initially this quote was meant to be attributed to the president of that name, who..

[Editor's note: This post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 20 January 2020.]

Internet trolls are people who lurk on social media and generally cause trouble for everybody else. I recently found a list of the ten types of internet trolls, and suspect I probably..