Some of my ancestors are just plain pesky. We all have them, those ancestors who refuse, for seemingly no good reason other than to annoy us, to cooperate with our efforts to document them. For years I had tried to verify the parents of my maternal great-grandfather,..
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Recently, I had the opportunity to drive through the breathtaking Pennsylvania countryside to teach a group of middle schoolers about family history and genealogy at Penn State University...
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Sometimes in the course of studying family history it helps when the right sort of inspiration knocks at our door. Blog sites like Vita..
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The next new Early New England Families Study Project sketch to be uploaded will be for Roger Goodspeed of Barnstable. Roger is a first-generation immigrant who arrived in New England sometime before December 1641, when he was married in Barnstable to Alice/Allis..
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[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 8 March 2016.]
When researching a family, one can quickly become focused on names, birthdates, and death dates. It is easy to get caught up on going as far back..
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I was recently reminded of just how small a town Hollywood is as I wrote up some notes on two photos featuring a (now) little-known actress named Kathryn Crawford. Born Kathryn..
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My mother, in the process of reorganizing her office, recently gave me a stack of family pictures and documents. I had already seen many of these photos of her parents and grandparents, but there was one that was unfamiliar and amazing: a large photo of my..
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A few years ago, when I first began to make quiet rumblings about selling My Old House and moving closer to my son, most people reacted with horror, surprise, and objections: “You wouldn’t really!” “Would you really sell it?” “What would your father, mother,..
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“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.” – George Eliot
My love of family history came from my grandmother. Growing up, I recall asking a lot of genealogical questions that most of my family couldn’t even begin to answer – except, of course, for..
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