If you live in the Greater Metropolitan area of Boston, your water travels a long way to get to your tap. And your palate thanks you! Boston water has a reputation for being straight from the spigot drinkable. Its origin..

For many of us, Labor Day is synonymous with the last celebration of summer—a time for cookouts, sporting events, and a final day off before the school year begins and autumn arrives. The very existence of the federal holiday (established..

One of the many benefits of pursuing genealogy is the chance to meet long-lost family members. In addition to the possibility of finding old photographs,..

Nestled in a corner of Beacon Hill is an extraordinary center of history, influence, and revolution. The African Meeting House is known for being the oldest black church building in America, but..

While I was in graduate school, I wrote my dissertation on tribal museums and the ways they share authority with the communities that they serve. I focused my research on the St. Regis..

Although my background is almost all German and English, I’ve always wanted to find a bit of Irish in me. This is because my husband was born in Cork City and after numerous visits I’ve fallen in love with..

Let’s take a step back in time. Imagine yourself in the 1840s as the British are slowly expanding their power into places like New Zealand and Hong Kong, the Oregon Trail is not just a video game but a real expedition, and you have traveled to California to make your..

The decennial United States Federal Census often forms the backbone of historical research into an unfamiliar family member. By its nature, the census will never be fully comprehensive or exact, but it can serve as a bit of a guard rail, keeping us from going off on an..

In the last post I talked about Massachusetts court records in general. Now let’s look closer at some examples from Middlesex County.

For the earliest records, the easiest entry point is the abstracts made by Thomas Wyman in the mid-nineteenth-century that are..

It is interesting to see the spread of a new technology reflected in my great-grandfather’s journal[1]: in this case, the electrification of the Bells’ farm in Kempsville, near Norfolk, Virginia. A little less than a century ago, this was a project one could undertake..