In the days when livestock mostly roamed loose in New England towns, it was critical that farmers could identify which animals belonged to them – to avoid disputes, identify stolen property, or recover damages if your crops were ruined by the neighborhood’s hogs. While..

My mother’s parents were from Norfolk, Virginia, and Baltimore, Maryland. From a grandchild’s perspective, they were Southerners, but as I grew up and became interested in genealogy, I noticed another strain: my grandfather’s mother and grandmother’s..

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..

According to the Book of Genesis, one of the first things Adam did was to give the things around him names: to name is to exert power – and to give it. An example of this in my own..

Ancestry.com has an interesting database category called Immigration & Travel, which includes a variety of passenger list and passport application databases. I have used them over the years to track members of my family as they..

Over the last five months, Vita Brevis has featured a number of blog posts about the Great Migration Study Project and related subjects. Robert Charles Anderson, the project’s director, has written on the topic, as have ..

Captain George W. Lane, a Christian missionary and a Civil War veteran, first visited Malaga Island in 1906. The island, located in the New Meadows River near Phippsburg, Maine, is now an uninhabited state preserve, but in Captain Lane’s time the island was the site of..

Last night I went to the monthly meeting of the Winthrop Improvement and Historical Association on the grounds of the Deane Winthrop House to hear John Winthrop Sears speak about his ancestral uncle. Deane² Winthrop..

Here is a table to help sort out where to look for your seventeenth-century ancestors in the publications associated with the Great Migration Study Project and the Early New England Families Study Project:

William Boucher Jr. had children born over a period of forty years (1847–1887); his grandchildren were born between 1877 and 1925. Boucher’s..