Many years ago, now, I visited a cousin outside Baltimore with the marvelous name of Camille Steward Marié (1918-2002).[1] He was the son of one of my great-grandfather’s first cousins, but because of the way our..

Well, Jeff Record got back at me with another Clue post, and wisely moved away from talking about double names, as there are only so many one can find! So, I’ll continue the game with my..

Growing up in a suburb outside San Francisco, my family vacationed in Lake Tahoe every summer. I remember driving by Donner Lake and driving over Donner Pass. I..

If you have ever tried to track down distant cousins, especially in foreign countries, you..

When I have given lectures and consultations on migrations into and out of New England, a frequent topic of discussion regards the question of whether the migration was religiously or economically motivated. For the period of The Great Migration into New England from..

Several months back, Chris Child and I started playing a game we’ve dubbed "Genealogical Clue." Playing a good game of it can be quite fun and challenging. Largely, it’s a game whereby we attempt to locate an individual in our..

If Our Old House builder, Asa Williams, had recently awakened from his 201-year eternal sleep, he would have seen, with fascinated but utter panic, the thunder of dragons that crawled up my driveway. (I think the blacksmith in Asa would find any fire-breathing dragons..

Several years ago, as part of an effort to find an image of my great-grandfather Edward Hughes Glidden (1873-1924), I set myself the goal of tracking down as many of his architectural commissions as I could. A relatively late convert to Facebook, I used my Facebook..

Continuing  with the ancestry of actor Billy Porter, the story of note I found in the actor’s maternal ancestry was more immediate and quite tragic. Porter’s mother Cloerinda Jean (Johnson) (Porter) Ford was the daughter of James and Martha (Richardson) Johnson, and..

[Author's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 23 November 2016.]

I trace my interest in genealogy to my early childhood. We lived surrounded by family – my paternal grandparents and uncle and aunt lived across the Ipswich..