Over the holidays, my mother gave me the very nice present of a family register that began with my great-great-great-grandparents – Robert and Emma (Russell) Thompson of Industry, Maine. This framed register used to hang on a wall at my grandparents’ home in Kansas,..
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Thanks to a timely message alerting me to a collection of letters for sale at eBay, I recently acquired one side of the genealogical correspondence between Regina Shober Gray[1] and the Rev. Richard Manning Chipman, author of The Chipman Lineage (1872). Mrs. Gray, so..
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Some people are extraordinarily difficult to shop for. My parents fall into that category. They’ve collected several things over the years, so even thinking of something they would like is a challenge. My father is also the sort of person who goes out and buys whatever..
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When I catalog new books received by the NEHGS library, my normal focus is, naturally, on the contents of the books themselves: the families and places described, the authors, the..
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At the beginning of 2017, Vita Brevis can boast 1,177,549 page views: while individual readers have surely read multiple articles on a given visit, that million+ reader count is still impressive!
Vita Brevis reached its one-millionth page view on 7 July, some..
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The bins of my family memorabilia (my “squirrel bins”) occasionally allow a real gem or two to escape, those things I hope to find but which seldom surface: diaries, journals, or letters.
One such gem is a faded, handwritten..
Continue reading[Author’s note: This series, on Mrs. Gray’s reading habits, began here.]
One early December a few years ago, my son asked if I would fill a cookie basket for his new landlord’s two little boys. I was making multiple dozens of cookies at the time, so I stuffed a green wooden Christmas basket for them and sent it off.
The following July..
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[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 26 December 2015.]
In 1860, when Regina Shober Gray began keeping her diary, gift-giving was..
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Back in 2002 or so, my mother and I took a trip to the small town of Solvang, California. Just north west of Santa Barbara, in the Santa Ynez Valley, this small town of 2.4 square miles is modelled on the traditions..
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