The name Campbell has been a favored first or middle name in the Steward family for the last..

I want to love the husband of my favorite ancestor, Hepsibah, as much as I love her … but I can’t. When I first began researching George Athearn,[1] he seemed to be the very model of an eighteenth-century gentleman: a 1775 graduate of Harvard and judge of probate in..

With the genealogy that I’ve completed so far on my family, I have found that I am French – so French! I have one great-grandparent from Roscommon, Ireland, but the rest of my family, as far back as I can research, is French. My maternal family originated in Meaux,..

[This series on royal cartes de visite began here.]

At left: The wedding of the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra of Denmark, 1863. Standing: The Crown Princess of Prussia, Prince Louis of Hesse, the bridegroom, and Princess Helena. Seated or kneeling: Princess..

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 2 May 2016.]

When I was..

Our house has lots of dusty boxes that came from the houses of deceased family members. There’s the box of stuff from my father’s bachelor brother, William “Bud” Buzzell, who served on an LST during World War II and who sold me my first car for a dollar. There are..

Before the internet and the digitization of some Irish records, one needed patience, persistence, and problem-solving skills to connect the lives of Irish immigrants here..

[This series on royal cartes de visite began here.]

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert viewed Prussia as their ideal among the multitude of German kingdoms,..

A few months ago I posted that, in tracing my wife's ancestors, I had yet to find an ancestor who was born anywhere but in the Dominican Republic. This all changed within the last few days,..

According to Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature, a tall tale is a “narrative that depicts the extravagantly exaggerated wild adventures of North American [sic] folk heroes.”[1] The..