One of Scott Steward’s recent posts reminded me of several conversations I have had with colleagues (not all of them genealogists) on how much we can fill in on our ahnentafeln [German for ancestor tables].

Several staff members at NEHGS..

Recently, I was prompted to take a ‘second look’ at my wife’s grandfather, Horace Fenton Bloodgood. Fenton married my wife’s grandmother, a young Spanish girl named Magdalena Murrieta,[1] in Buena Vista, Sonora, Mexico, in 1908..

Given the range of databases like Wikipedia and IMDb (more formally The Internet Movie Database), it can be surprising to find a scrap of biographical material that has not been covered. I..

I have an entertaining update on my mysterious great-great-great-grandfather John A. Through alias True (1835–1912). In my recent post on this family, I discovered (with the help of DNA) his second later family, his slightly changed name, four additional children (a..

Following up on my recent blog post about genealogical memory (“What do you know?”), I took a fresh look at some persistent brick walls in my mother’s family. The blog post – and a 5-generation fan chart template..

We all have them. Yes, those stacks of old photographs passed down to us. They are images from someone else’s life; what can be daunting is that these are pictures we have to appraise even when we know nothing about what they mean. Often..

Fraternal organizations are not as commonplace for most people today as they were back in the mid-1800s on through the twentieth century. Our ancestors joined these groups for camaraderie, financial support regarding burials, insurance, and more. There were hundreds of..

By now followers of my Vita Brevis posts are well aware that no genealogy is perfect. Period. No matter who wrote it.

The old mindset that a work published in a book or an article is automatically complete and completely accurate should be dead by now. The problem has..

[Editor's note: This series began here and continued here.]

The last topic that I originally wanted to discuss in my article on organizing and preserving your family papers was digitization. For someone who wants to digitize their material there are a few things that..

In a recent meeting here at NEHGS, the conversation turned to the ease with which visitors to our Newbury Street building could fill out a three-, four-, or five-generation family chart, listing..