Next weekend, Bill Griffeth and I will be speaking at the Brattleboro Literary Festival on DNA and genealogy, and the surprise results described in his book The Stranger in My Genes. For those who are not are familiar with the book, it all started when DNA results were..
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On 31 May 1619 John Shipway, the son of John Shipway, was baptized in Charfield in Gloucestershire.[1] Or so it the record shows. However, in 1897, this record was found to be part of an elaborate fraud..
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A recent quiz in The Weekly Genealogist asked readers to share the nature of any secrets they’d uncovered about their ancestors. More than one third of respondents indicated that they had not uncovered any secrets – to which I say, “Hah! You..
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As those who have applied to hereditary societies may already know, several groups have a policy of requiring every birth, marriage, and death certificate for the most recent three generations..
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There is a remote area in the study of family history. Some will call it a myth, or say it has no proper place in the field of study. It hides from anyone who would study it like a registrar, and rarely cloaks itself in any..
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[Author's note: This series, on the German origin of the Boucher family of Baltimore, began here.]
With regard to my great-great-great-grandfather Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Esprit Boucher (bp. 1799), I feel on firm ground in ascribing ..
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Is truth really stranger than fiction? I’ll let you be the judge. Out of the blue, I received a lengthy message this summer from a woman in Phoenix, through ancestry.com. Here’s an abridged version:
“Hello. Based on your family tree, I..
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Recently I was researching my Holland surname line and ran into an interesting problem. I found two men named William Holland, each of whom..
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Recently, after completing – without hospitalization or arrest (for significant abuse of a power tool) a major painting project involving thirty-five exterior louvered house shutters attached to My Old House – many people asked me how old the vinyl shutters actually..
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