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..

Family history research gives us an opportunity to learn more about our ancestors’ experiences in their..

You could be 10, 43, or 85. You could be a beginner or an expert. But if you love genealogy as much as I do, you know how special a visit to the headquarters of New England Historic Genealogical Society..

My interest in genealogy sprouted at an early age, when my father would tell me stories he heard as a child about my great-great-grandfather, Christopher McNanny. He recounted that Christopher served as a drummer boy during the Civil War, and endured the amputation of..

“They said she was the daughter of a slave.”

“Wait a minute, Papi!”

I was on the phone with my father, talking about connections to relatives we had discovered through our Ancestry DNA testing. My..