Recently, I had the opportunity to drive through the breathtaking Pennsylvania countryside to teach a group of middle schoolers about family history and genealogy at Penn State University...

Sometimes in the course of studying family history it helps when the right sort of inspiration knocks at our door. Blog sites like Vita..

While my article about arranging your family papers in the winter edition of American Ancestors was meant to provide readers with the sense that they could preserve their collections on their own, I thought it would be helpful to go back and provide information that..

I did not learn to spell properly until I learned to type at the Katharine Gibbs School. This may have had something to do with my less-than-perfect handwriting. Seeing a word in type instead of scribble helps me spot the errors.

In genealogy, of course, we run into..

My mother, in the process of reorganizing her office, recently gave me a stack of family pictures and documents. I had already seen many of these photos of her parents and grandparents, but there was one that was unfamiliar and amazing: a large photo of my..

A few years ago, when I first began to make quiet rumblings about selling My Old House and moving closer to my son, most people reacted with horror, surprise, and objections: “You wouldn’t really!” “Would you really sell it?” “What would your father, mother,..

“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.” – George Eliot

My love of family history came from my grandmother. Growing up, I recall asking a lot of genealogical questions that most of my family couldn’t even begin to answer – except, of course, for..

This July marks the 250th birthday of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States and an original member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Born on 11 July 1767 in Braintree, Massachusetts, Adams was a passionate orator and ardent..

“Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.” – William Ralph Inge

In family history, a blissful and naive notion often occurs when we begin to think we have learned all there is to know about any..

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 6 January 2016.]

Coming from a family of active amateur photographers, the (still) new digital age of photography has significantly changed the way I look at and..