Category Archives: American-history

Ex libris

A mysterious unnamed and undated photo, found in a book recently donated to NEHGS.

When I catalog new books received by the NEHGS library, my normal focus is, naturally, on the contents of the books themselves: the families and places described, the authors, the..

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2016: the year in review concluded

At the beginning of 2017, Vita Brevis can boast 1,177,549 page views: while individual readers have surely read multiple articles on a given visit, that million+ reader count is still impressive!

Vita Brevis reached its one-millionth page view on 7 July, some..

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2016: the year in review

Each December I gather up a dozen blog posts from the year just ending, in hopes of giving new (and long-time) readers a sense of the breadth of content Vita Brevis offers.

On 13 January, Zachary Garceau published a post on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, marking..

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'A kind faithful friend'

[Author’s note: This series, on Mrs. Gray’s reading habits, began here.]

Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
The year 1864 would be marked by several important changes in Regina Shober Gray’s [1] circle. The first was the..Continue reading

Fireside chats, 2016

This year’s holiday Open House at the NEHGS library on Saturday, December 10, included several Fireside Chats. In the morning Marie Daly and Judy Lucey discussed Irish genealogy.

In the afternoon Chris Child covered the different types of DNA testing – Y-chromosome,..

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ICYMI: The Philadelphia box

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 26 December 2015.]

Hedwiga Regina Shober Gray diary, entries for 5-7 February 1864. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections

In 1860, when Regina Shober Gray began keeping her diary, gift-giving was..

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The Winthrop Papers

A new database on AmericanAncestors that you might not think to look at is Gov. John Winthrop Papers, Vol. 1–5, 1557 to 1649. These five volumes were originally published by the Massachusetts Historical Society between 1929 and 1947. (The sixth volume, published in..

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Connecting cousins

I noted in a previous blog post that my husband Paul and I are live-in caretakers at the William Clapp House in Dorchester, Massachusetts. This house was built in 1806 and serves as the headquarters of the Dorchester Historical Society. Paul and I assist the Society..

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The spitting image

"Ready to roll"

Oral histories are always interesting, often fun, and sometimes “tall,” especially when it comes to snow stories: “I had to walk to school, three miles up hill each way, barefoot in deep snow...” Snow in New England is just a fact of life, and one my..

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Changing town names

Partial map of Norfolk County, 1888, showing Dedham, Hyde Park, and Milton still in the county, while Dorchester has already been annexed to Boston. Robinson’s Atlas of Norfolk County, Massachusetts (New York: E. Robinson, 1888)

In documenting the dates on Mabelle..

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