Last year I wrote about the family register that I was given detailing the family of my great-great-great-grandparents Robert Thompson (1795–1854) and his third wife Emma Russell (1808–1872) of Industry, Maine. I mentioned in the..

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 22 April 2016.]

Genealogists and historians of Massachusetts are indebted to the works of..

Enlarging on last week’s topic about Peer Review, it is always best to know who is who in any industry. The industry of genealogical research goes back almost 200 years, so that covers a lot of “Whos,” but here are some lists to help:

The American Society of..

Genealogists can learn from Fantasy Football. The focus with which some people research yards per game or number of completed passes is the same that every genealogist should put into learning about the “team” of authors upon whom they are basing their own work. Is..

Persistent family genealogists will eventually encounter a relative who died in a state hospital, city shelter, or mental institution. In many instances, that fact may have been hidden, disguised, or made more palatable for public perception. The death of my..

With the Winter Olympics almost upon us, we will be hearing a lot about “perfect” scores in the sports where judges assign points for such things as technical difficulty and artistic interpretation.

A “scoring” system for genealogies would be interesting. If, for..

On Friday, I wrote about some of the most widely-read Vita Brevis posts of 2017. To mark the beginning of the next year, here are six more popular posts showcasing the range of subjects covered in a blog that publishes about 250 posts a year. (In fact, Vita Brevis..

As the old year winds down over the next few days, I hope that dedicated Vita Brevis readers will spare a few moments to (re)read some of the most popular posts of 2017. (The second part of this omnibus post will run on New Year’s Day 2018.) The following twelve posts..

I have traced my husband’s paternal line back to Anthony Siekman, who was born in Germany about 1821. I knew from his petition for naturalization that he arrived in the United States in 1852, but I did not know much beyond that. As the progenitor of this line in..

Last weekend I had an extremely fruitful session of something my husband and I call “Moses Marcussing.” While the Rev. Moses Marcus is not an ancestor or even a cousin of mine, he appears in my family tree as the..