[Editor's note: This post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 7 October 2014.]

Last week, I was happily recalling my 2012 trip to Finland, specifically a visit to my ancestral village, Teuva. I had the great good luck to meet cousins there and see the land that my..

A practice I had utilized in a prior post, regarding New York state deaths appearing in Connecticut sources, has turned up in a new context. In the prior case, someone from Connecticut..

Next week I will be attending the Who Do You Think You Are? Live conference in Birmingham, England, where it is expected that more than 12,000 participants will be in attendance. The mustering of such a large body of genealogists and..

Not long ago, I was searching for a record of an 1830s marriage between two prominent Scottish families. I was certain I would have an easy time locating this particular record, having identified the parish and county in which the..

In his 1930 novel Immaturity, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.” Shaw had a point with that statement. While we can deny them, hide them, or ignore them, we can’t..

We pick up the Bouchers in 1912 with Mrs. Frances Boucher[1] and her sons Carlos H., clerk, and Emile G., “2d vice pres. Crook-Horner Supply Co.,” at 1718 Linden Avenue in Baltimore, along with Mrs...

As anyone engaged in the study of family history knows, researching the women of the past can be a difficult process. Many commonly used sources draw out details in the lives of men but provide only..

[Author's note: This post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 3 September 2014.]

When I started out as a genealogical writer, I followed the model of genealogies published earlier in the twentieth century. The genealogical world they depicted was an orderly one, with..

My review of almost sixty years’ worth of Baltimore city directories has yielded much information on my great-great-great-grandfather E. W. Boucher; my great-great-grandfather William Boucher Jr. (1822–1899) and his two wives; and many of..

[Editor's note: This post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 22 August 2014.]

Now that my book on genealogical research methods (Elements of Genealogical Analysis) is out, I have turned my attention to the series of lectures I will be delivering in October and..