Much of my attention over the last eighteen months has been focused on creating the online database Mayflower Families Fifth Generation Descendants, 1700-1880. It was great to make this resource available to help people research their Mayflower ancestry.

Now we have a..

Just after 5:30 a.m., last October 9, I got a text from my half-sister letting me know that she and her children..

I started at NEHGS as a volunteer, coming in every Friday for about four hours. My first project involved checking the..

A few years ago, as I was looking into what NEHGS’ collection held on Italian research subjects, I came across a manuscript that was created in 1954 by a woman who was interested in documenting the Italians of Kingston, Massachusetts. The Coming of Italians to Kingston..

While researching family stories for verification (and, let’s face it, amusement), I began to think that we all face the same questions: “Huh?” turns into “Why did he/she/they do that?,” which morphs into..

My sister-in-law Sue and I hoped we might uncover a backstory behind the marriage of her great-great-grandparents. Aimé Vallée, age 21, of St. Casimir, Québec, wed his third cousin, Marguerite Vallée, age 43, widow of François..

Immigration to the United States has often been a difficult and time-consuming process, and never more so than during the first half of the twentieth century. The immigration laws of the 1920s established a..

Continuing my project of reviewing recent scholarship (or new databases) that might add material to Richard Evans’s 2007 book, The Ancestry of Diana, Princess of Wales, I have reached the late Princess’s great-great-great-grandparents. Among them: James Brownell..

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..

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..