Probate inventories can tell us a lot about the living conditions of our ancestors, but as they are usually difficult to read and interpret, more often than not the little details are skipped by family historians. Nearly everyone records the amount of land in the..

“Write down what you know” is the first step in family history research. For many of us, what we know includes family stories that have been passed down from generation to generation. But sometimes those stories can be misleading – or just plain incorrect. For example,..

At the moment, I am working on three different family histories, two of them for families in Boston, and one for a New York Dutch clan.

As part of the research process, each of these family histories will, at some point, generate a questionnaire for modern-day family..

I cannot imagine the faith that John Leverett and his wives, Hannah Hudson and Sarah Sedgwick, must have had to cope with deaths of so many of their children. By his two wives, John was the father of eighteen children, eleven of whom died as infants or young children. ..

As I revise the new NEHGS Guide to Genealogical Writing (2014), I’ve been thinking ahead to a future project of my own: writing my family’s history. Having edited and produced a number of compiled genealogies at NEHGS, I have the genealogical format down cold. That’s..

On a recent trip to Salt Lake City, I took along a list of questions to work on. I hoped to demonstrate directly that Alexander Nowell, the prominent English Puritan, actually had interactions with his grandnephew, Increase Nowell of Charlestown, Massachusetts..

A month or so ago, I knew comparatively little about one of my great-grandfathers, a Baltimore architect. Most of what I knew was genealogical in nature, but I had – and have – no photographs, and I did not know much about his oeuvre, which was mostly apartment houses..

For me, the whole point of genealogy is the challenge of reconstructing families and providing them with context.  Not just names, dates and places, but the real lives people led. That’s why I’m enjoying my job with the Early New England Families Study Project so much...

Welcome to Vita Brevis, the blog of American Ancestors, a national nonprofit center for family history, heritage, and culture based in Boston, Massachusetts, that has been setting the gold standard for family history research since its founding in 1845. Today, American..