I love learning about the history of food. Just as genealogy does, learning about the evolution of food and food culture feeds my desire to fully understand how the people who came before us lived on a day-to-day basis. Recently, I did a..

As a kind of sequel to my post on “kinbot,” the medieval Scottish practice of making amends after slaying a kinsman, I can offer two stories of Livingston family murderesses … and the very..

As I work on a genealogy of the Livingston family in Scotland and America, I am roughing out appendices covering..

Finishing up this series on places my family enjoyed during our socially distant summer, I move now from the North Shore to the South Shore, to “World’s End” in Hingham. This Trustees property was designed by the well-known landscape..

My prior post on my own matrilineal ancestry and merged names continues with my father’s matrilineal line. My paternal grandmother’s parents were both natives of Philadelphia, and she recorded many of her..

Okay. Let’s clear something up straight away. Like the rest of us here, I see dead people.^[1] The truth is, though, that “my visions” aren’t always very clear, and..

With this most unusual summer now coming to an end, my family of four spent a lot more time together and got to enjoy some outdoor spots within an hour’s drive from Boston. We visited several spots..

At our dinner table recently, talk turned to a discussion of family stories, specifically the story that our great great-great-great-grandfather, George Read, refused to paint his chimneys white in the English style because he was so..

As any genealogical researcher with French ancestry knows, if you ever bring up those French forebears, the first question you’ll inevitably be asked is “Were they Huguenots?” But who exactly were the Huguenots? Where did they come from? And..

An “added” middle name is something that comes up quite a lot when seeing family trees online and can sometimes be difficult to detect...