A barefooted Lucille Coffin, date unknown.

Names are the bedrock of family history research. Finding, sorting, and verifying them takes time. Shared names between generations can cause confusion—such as in the case of professional baseball player Wilmer Flores, whose..

Omaha Beach, 6 June 1944. By Robert F. Sargent

The world will pause today to remember the events in France which occurred eighty years ago during “Operation Overlord”—better remembered as D-Day. Many fine young men would not come home to their families from those..

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..

Undated photo of Charles Anthony Stevens at home (in the family's collection)

In 1886, my great-grandfather Charles Anthony Stevens (1859–1932) opened a small retail shop in Chicago. At first, Chas. A. Stevens sold silk fabrics and notions to local women who made their..

When I moved from Mexico to the United States with my family as a teenager, my last name quickly became a recurring issue in administrative settings. Very often, offices would file documents under my second last name, confusing my first last name for a middle name. I..

My great-grandmother Kathleen never spoke much about her childhood, but she always wondered what happened to her little brother Joe.

Some obituaries provide little to no information aside from the deceased individual’s age and death location—but others can be invaluable sources for learning more about a person’s life and family.

Many of the..

Not too long ago, I shared my experience of joining American Ancestors’ recent Scottish Heritage Tour. In that post I briefly introduced you to an intriguing ancestor of mine—John Lynch Breslin, Jr., who was imprisoned for attempted arson. Today I want to discuss how I..