It is summer time and the siren call of the road echoes through my mind: “Come explore! Leave your desk and your clutter. Forget the phone, pack your car and come explore!” When we were children, summer meant road trips to far off and “exotic” places such as Nova..

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 13 May 2015.]

David Allen Lambert’s April post on livelihoods inspired me to consider my own “family’s business.” In looking at my..

I simply love Register style as a way of presenting descendants of a particular ancestor. Chris Child’s recent post made me realize just how much I love it. It is..

Yesterday afternoon, sometime after 2 p.m., Vita Brevis marked a major milestone in the life of a blog with its one-millionth page view. Since it officially launched on 10 January 2014, with Robert Charles Anderson’s Deep Puritan Roots post, Vita Brevis has published..

In the Early New England Families Study Project sketch for Joseph Andrews of Hingham, I included a commentary about the problem I was having establishing the birth order for Joseph’s children. Recently, an inquirer wondered why I had not used the order the children are..

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 30 March 2015.]

Before I began researching my ancestry, I was overwhelmed by the undertaking. It seemed like an impossible..

I have questioned published history my whole life, and have sought out the stories from the documents or in some cases the source. I was the obnoxious eight-year-old kid who went to Plimouth Plantation and posed my questions to the re-enactor John..

If you have been binge watching the latest season of Orange is the New Black, you may have learned an interesting bit of trivia, courtesy of the Martha Stewart/Paula Deen-inspired new character of Judy King, who mentions that Wonder Woman creator..

Some photographs of our ancestors are beyond price. This one of my mother’s father, Ed Hawes, was taken in 1899, when he was still planning on a Naval career. Unfortunately, as a midshipman, he was thrown down a hatch in a hazing incident that shattered his hip.

Ed,..

My Simons ancestors came from a picturesque region in England known as the Vale of Belvoir (pronounced “Beever,” and meaning “beautiful view,” from the French), found at the intersection of three counties: Leicestershire,..