Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue mall features monumental statues on most blocks, and the block closest to NEHGS boasts a representation of Alexander Hamilton given to the city by Benjamin Tyler..Continue reading
Walter Camp. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
On 6 November 1869, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the Rutgers Queensmen[1] defeated the College of New Jersey[2] Tigers by a score of 6 to 4 in what is regarded as the first college football game ever played.[3] College..
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Figure 1. The Hancock easy chair with its replaced yellow worsted damask upholstery. The chair is currently on display at the NEHGS Library. Photo by Greg Anthony
In addition to its vast collection of genealogical materials, the New England Historic Genealogical..
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Portrait of Henry Stoddard Ruggles, author of The Ruggles Family in England and America (1898).
For the past six months, I have been devoting much of my time as Metadata Librarian at NEHGS to making older genealogies from our Boston research library available online..
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Meeting cousins in County Roscommon.
Vita Brevis recently marked a milestone, with the publication of its five-hundredth blog post. Early in January 2016, the blog will celebrate its second birthday, and, in a tradition started last year, today and tomorrow I will..
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Hedwiga Regina Shober Gray diary, entries for 5-7 February 1864. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections
In 1860, when Regina Shober Gray began keeping her diary, gift-giving was spread between Christmas and New Year’s Day: indeed, the latter day was the more important..
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One of my recent research cases involved searching for information within societies and organizations. It began with searching in newspapers for an 1849 obituary in order to gather more biographical information about my research subject, but I also looked for any..
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Sheldon Poor House Association, 1860. Click on images to expand them.
Vita Brevis readers are likely all too familiar with the problem of brick walls in genealogical research. Many are aware of the uses of probate and estate records, but what if your ancestors are..
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Editor's Note: This is part three of a series on digitizing our special collections. The previous posts can be read here and here.
Good news! The next phase of our digitization project is under way. We’ve just received the first batch of images from our scanning..
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Over the past thirty years I have examined thousands of old slate gravestones in the cemeteries of New England. This fascination led me to write A Guide to Massachusetts Cemeteries, which allowed me to determine the oldest cemeteries in the Commonwealth of..
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