As a volunteer at NEHGS, my current assignment is to proofread and potentially correct the indexed records of the Massachusetts: Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston Records, 1789-1900 collection. If you..
Continue readingIn my last Vita Brevis post, I mentioned that an enormous wild fire had swept through the area where my maternal grandmother’s family has..
Continue reading →When researching ancestors who fought in the Civil War, don’t forget to examine their Combined Military Service Records for important genealogical data. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Combined Military..
Continue reading →A year or so back, I was contacted by a favorite cousin of mine asking for help with..
Continue reading →While the interests of my young sons and nieces brought me to the Air Zoo: Aerospace and Science Experience in Portage, Michigan, those with ties to aviation in their..
Continue reading →More than a decade ago I had the opportunity to edit Richard Evans’s account of the ancestry of Diana, Princess of Wales. Looking now at the finished product gives me great pleasure: it seems to me both intrinsically interesting as an expansive view of one person’s..
Continue reading →Many of us cherish the notion that historical photographs capture a frozen moment in time. Upon more detailed examination, though, studio pictures sometimes possess more artifice and contrivance than would have been expected. Take, for instance, these paired images..
Continue reading →Several years ago my mother gave me a family picture that is unlike most family pictures; in fact, without the identifying information on the back, it doesn’t seem to be a family picture at all. Thank goodness for the label, which gives a ton of information, not only..
Continue reading →I recently read a book by Ellen Marie Wiseman entitled What She Left Behind. Among other themes in the book, it depicted the treatment of a woman who was committed to an asylum in early 1920 by her father. The main character was committed because she..
Continue reading →One of my more inscrutable brick walls isn’t made out of brick at all. Rather, it looks to be made of cheese. No, not cheddar, bleu, or provolone, nor is it built from anything lost in the Badger State. I guess if had to describe the wall – you know, to say what sort..
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