This past weekend, about twenty-five of my Boucher cousins gathered to tour the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s show, “Making Music: The Banjo in Baltimore and Beyond,” with its three curators. Our visit to the BMI likely marked the first large-scale reunion of the..

An article linked from The Weekly Genealogist had me thinking about how to conduct research in unfamiliar languages. I will soon..

As we approach the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I was reminded of a variety of early twentieth-century Rosh Hashanah postcards that I had seen in the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society–New England Archives. I remembered how..

For the past several years NEHGS has been giving seminars on writing and publishing a family history. These have been very popular, and as a result, Penny Stratton and I refocused the two previous NEHGS writing guides to reflect the contents of the seminars. The..

The first fourteen steps in my process for creating entries for the Early New England Families Study Project are covered in three previous posts, beginning here:

15. Analysis. Many, many books have been written about genealogical analysis. I have just read the most..

In this information age, many of us worry about others sharing pieces we have written, scanned, or recorded. What we may not..

Following on from Jean Maguire’s post yesterday on NEHGS collection research options covered this year at Vita Brevis, I thought it might be useful to look at the coverage of international research at the blog. A lively group of articles follow, suggesting the range of..

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 November; these, in turn, will form the basis for a future book entitled Puritan..

When public figures die, I sometimes undertake research on their ancestry as a kind of summing up. In the days since the death of comic and acting icon Robin Williams, for example, I have been thinking about his potential connection..

Massachusetts is one of a handful or so states that allow relatively open access to vital information. It is certainly possible to conduct family research after 1930 for Massachusetts using a combination of resources. FamilySearch.org..