Of all the things we leave behind when our time is done, the most important, of course, is ourselves, the least and the most of our lives. While cultures vary in the veneration of ancestors, my staunch Puritan ancestors held to the rites of our New England traditions.

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My grandfather (Walter Robert "Bob" Heisinger, a.k.a. Poppa) was notorious for carrying around a gigantic wallet bursting at the seams with photographs, business cards, and other little mementos he picked up over the years. He would often pull bits and pieces out at..

Finding two gravestones for the same person – particularly a widowed person who marries again, or perhaps moves further west – is something not uncommon in genealogical research. A gravestone may be inscribed with both parties’ names with..

Getting back to our Roger Thompson book club, the next title on my shelf is Divided We Stand, Watertown, Massachusetts, 1630-1680.[1] Here Thompson presents a holistic view of what it was like living in Watertown by studying five areas – I. New World from Old (The Lie..

Several weeks ago I received an email from an acquaintance of mine, a man I will describe only as a prominent African American personality. Let's call him Alex. He emailed to say he had read my book, The Stranger in My Genes, and he wanted to discuss something with me...

"The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example." ~ Benjamin Disraeli

Somewhere out on that big blue horizon, under a Rocky Mountains moon, there is a soldier’s grave – or at least so..

While preparing for a consultation this week, I stumbled across a marvelous online site for digitized local history books: Ourroots.ca (http://www.ourroots.ca). The site is maintained by the University of Calgary and seeks to “preserve Canada’s unique identity for..

Steven Weyand Folkers’ comment on a recent post – regarding a father and son both marrying women surnamed Miller, but from unrelated families – reminded me of a..

We are all familiar with the on-line address databases that pretend to list “relatives,” which often are no more than similar names picked up by the databases’ algorithms. My own listing, for example, includes none of my real relatives and instead links me to strangers..

It was late one summer, sometime toward the end of the last century, when I received the call. The voice on the other end of the line was that of a woman in the throes of Alzheimer’s disease. Her name was Barbara, and she was pleading..