After my grandfather died, my dad took on the task of cleaning out my grandfather’s closet and saving items to share with the family. Like many closets collecting junk over the years, it contained a mix of useful and useless items, but one unexpected gem caught my..

Ann Martin Appleby and Alexander Appleby: rightful heirs?

When I began looking for documents to fill in details about my New Brunswick ancestors, I had never heard of the DeGrace family fortune. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a will made by the adoptive..

I recently met with the widow of my father’s first cousin Dexter, who died in 2022, to look over some family documents. I had already seen and scanned most of these items, sharing them with relatives through online cloud storage. One item which I hadn’t seen before is..

I spent over a decade volunteering at the Custom House Maritime Museum in Newburyport, Massachusetts. During that time I’ve helped with many projects, but one of the most exciting began when I uncovered a ship log with an unusual provenance. Unlike the vast majority of..

I consider myself a west coast woman. Five of my great-grandparents were born on the west coast (three in Southern California, one in Oregon, and one in Washington). A sixth great-grandparent was born in Ohio, but moved to Southern California as a young boy. As for the..

Unlike the old-world monarchies of Europe, the United States has no hereditary titles. Even so, some..

My earlier post, featuring my parents and both sets of grandparents, sought photographs of these relatives from early adult life – I am fortunate to have a number of such images for all six from which to choose!

Looking for photos of my eight..

I have posted a few times about going back to the original records after looking at transcriptions. Sometimes you may have multiple versions of later transcriptions, or an uncited genealogy may have read the records more correctly than the published transcription, or..

I was recently interviewed for an article in the Boston Globe on the ancestry of Dr. Patrick Graves Jackson, husband of Ketanji Brown Jackson,..

Before joining NEHGS as a researcher, I worked with the National Parks of Boston researching patriots of color from Massachusetts who served during the Revolutionary War. While doing this research, I spent time looking through pension records to gain an understanding..