[Editor's note: This post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 5 April 2019.]

How do you choose photos for a family history? Someone recently asked me that excellent question. She happened to have dozens, if not..

Last fall I was asked to do some research for a local historical society called Oregon Black Pioneers about a group of coal miners recruited to work in Coos..

In the summer of 1962, when I was three, my parents bought their first home on..

I’ve now lived in Boston for eighteen years. During the first five years I lived in three different Boston neighborhoods – Allston, Brighton, and Fenway, before buying our home in Jamaica Plain. All our apartment leases began on September 1st and ended the next year on..

The conversations at my family dinner table usually center around daily activities: what the kids did at school, which beach are we going to this weekend, whose pool can we finagle an invitation to – normal things. Recently, while my kids and I visited with my older..

There are Remembering Days when we remember stories about family lives for the benefit of our descendants. There are Researching Days when we hunt for clues to our ancestors’ lives and their stories. And there are Underwear Days, when Remembering and..

A recent news article discussed the current use of an old Boston cemetery, with the permission of the church, as a dog park, prompting a neighborhood discussion. (This reminded me of David..

Two hundred eleven years ago today, on 6 August 1810, Assistant Marshal Ebenezer Burrell set out to make a full and accurate count of the residents of Salem, Massachusetts. He was instructed to make a formal inquiry at each dwelling house, or with the head of..

When I first started working at a brewery and learning about beer, I heard someone telling a story about Ninkasi, the goddess of beer in ancient Sumerian religious mythology.[1] As a historian I knew how important beer was in..

Known as the oldest Catholic cemetery in Boston, Saint Augustine Cemetery in South Boston will celebrate its two hundred and third anniversary in 2021. Built in 1818 by the first Catholic Bishop of Massachusetts, Fr. John Louis Ann Magdalen..