One fall weekend in 2008 my wife, Karen, and I were visiting her parents at their home on Long Island. After dinner one evening, my mother-in-law asked if I might like to see a collection of journals kept by her maternal grandfather, Glenn Welmer Douglass (1884–1968),..

As a genealogist at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, there are many aspects of my job that I truly enjoy – especially when it involves helping those new to the hobby of family history get off on the right foot. One of my favorite experiences is the chance..

While interning at the American Jewish Historical Society—New England Archives and..

My father, borrowing a line from Henry Ford, used to tease me that I could pick any color apple I wanted in the basket “as long as it was red.” (They were all red.) I have been asked to explain how I choose which families to do for the Early New England Families Study..

Marilynne K. Roach will lecture tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the New England Historic Genealogical Society (99-101 Newbury Street  in Boston). Marilynne’s most recent book is Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the..

Expectations are tricky. As genealogists, we should always be on the look-out for new information, recognizing that the data sought may be in a different location, or format, or offer different content than we had expected.

Lately, as I’ve mentioned, I have been..

I am currently at work processing the Farley Family Papers, a large collection that includes hundreds of letters, photographs, estate records, and military records created by several generations of Farleys in Massachusetts. The wide variety of documents found in the..

When I was in school thirty plus years ago, there was a lot of discussion about the differences between history and genealogy – usually with genealogy getting the short end of the stick. The gap between historians and genealogists narrowed once we realized that we all..

A current research preoccupation of mine is a photo of my maternal grandfather, Arthur David Belforti (born Achille Alessio Riccardo Belforti, 1902-1996), which my mother recently gave me and which is pictured here. Having had a..

I frequently encounter eighteenth- or nineteenth-century dates, especially on the migration trail, that are not cited and which often derive from “online trees,” usually the FamilySearch Ancestral File, Rootsweb WorldConnect, or Ancestry World Tree. These days, I find..