“In the fits of our ages, tales and characters are revealed” ... or so it was the case with my grandmother, as dementia stole over her mind during the last years of her life.[1] I..
Continue readingMy wife’s maternal grandmother, Lydia (Woliung) Faulds (1896-1939), was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father was a blacksmith with family roots in Alsace. Her mother was a recent immigrant from Germany. The family later moved to Matoon,..
Continue reading →Researching someone with a common name can be challenging. Sometimes you will find too many records, and without more identifying information it can be almost impossible to determine which is the correct record. Or, if you do find a promising record, how do you know if..
Continue reading →If A is the son of B, and C is the grandson of B, and C’s father is D and mother is E, then how is E related to A…?
In addition to the main allied families in the Livingston project — Douglas of..
Continue reading →[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 3 July 2020.]
During this 175th anniversary year, I wondered how we marked an earlier NEHGS milestone, one hundred years ago. To learn about..
Continue reading →Our family has an historic heirloom, a microscope that originally belonged to [Heinrich Hermann] Robert Koch (1843-1910), the famous German bacteriologist, who won the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his discoveries related to the causative agents of..
Continue reading →Last year I made a post teasing about an upcoming article I had written that showed, with the assistance of Y-DNA evidence, a Mayflower descent for Prime Minister Winston Churchill (among other notable figures)...
Continue reading →The reason I have not been active on Vita Brevis recently can be laid at the feet of the Phelps family of Salem. Five members of the family will “soon” be published together as the Phelps Cluster despite their complete refusal to cooperate. Here is a little of what I..
Continue reading →A recent Vita Brevis post (October 28) discussed my discovery and correction of an error in the baptismal records of the parish church in Coli (Piacenza), Italy. I attributed that error to an absentminded priest who wrote the wrong family name for Domenica Plate when..
Continue reading →There are some great lines in one of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey stories about the way his “persistent and undignified inquisitiveness,” his “habit of asking silly questions,” leads him to pursue anomalies to a conclusion. In this story, “The Entertaining..
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