When we think about Italian immigration here at NEHGS, it is often because the patron we are helping is looking for ancestors who arrived here in the late 1800s or early 1900s. However, Italians immigrated to many..

One day a few years ago, my mother (who was 85 at the time) got a phone call from a young lady who said “Hello, I think I’m your cousin!” Mom, who was well aware of and always on the lookout for scams, immediately assumed that..

Five new Early New England Families Study Project sketches have just been posted:

I just returned from representing the New England Historic Genealogical Society at the Southern California Genealogical Jamboree’s forty-fifth annual event in Burbank, California. In addition to getting the opportunity to meet some of the..

Robert Frost’s famous poem, The Road Not Taken, begins with his contemplation of “two roads diverg[ing] in a yellow wood,” and his indecision about whether to follow one path or the other. In the end, the author chooses what he deems “the path less traveled by.” Yet..

In a few days, Vita Brevis will have published one hundred blog posts. Thinking back to about a year ago, when the subject of the blog was first broached, I can say that I only thought through the mechanics of preparing and posting the first half-dozen; everything..

I own some shares in mutual funds and have a basic understanding of the stock market, but I am in no way, shape, or form the person you want to talk to about investing your money. When I am trying to figure out how to invest my money, I face the same kind of..

The question from the previous post was: “What if John Smith and Mary Brown lived in Barnstable but Abigail Smith and Harry Carey were married at Sandwich?” Barnstable and Sandwich are right next to each other, so why would this raise a red flag?

Although this example..

In my last post, I left Abigail (Smith) Carey in a Black Hole with conflicting information about her age. Age discrepancies are a common cause of Red Flags and avoiding them requires an understanding of such things as the average age at marriage for men and women in..

My “Devil’s advocate” pops up and waves red flags at me whenever something is not quite right based on “our” experience. Our most often used flag is for “black holes” – too much missing information. The connection may be right, but it certainly hasn’t yet been proved,..