On Tuesday, NEHGS announced the first fruits of an historic collaboration with the Archdiocese of Boston, one where – over a period of years – Archdiocesan records will be digitized and made available on the NEHGS website, AmericanAncestors.org. In the fullness of..

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

Regina Shober Gray [1] continued to take an interest in her neighbors:

61 Bowdoin Street, Boston, Friday, 5 February..

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I came across an interesting family story while working on the Early New England Families Study Project sketch for Henry Lamprey of Hampton, New Hampshire, that claimed his wife received a dowry from her family equal to her weight in gold!

The story apparently first..

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Thanks to a timely message alerting me to a collection of letters for sale at eBay, I recently acquired one side of the genealogical correspondence between Regina Shober Gray[1] and the Rev. Richard Manning Chipman, author of The Chipman Lineage (1872). Mrs. Gray, so..

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

The year 1864 would be marked by several important changes in Regina Shober Gray’s [1] circle. The first was the..Continue reading →

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

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

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