Observance of Memorial Day always compels me to think about the members of my extended family from Block Island who served in the Civil War, and the long-term effects of the war on their lives. This carte-de-visite photo of eighteen-year-old George Albion Paine, taken..

When I was growing up, my father would sometimes solemnly remind me to remember Francis Ward Lewis. I would just nod absentmindedly in..

On November 2, 2022, my husband and I welcomed our first child: a son, named Jack..

A recent series of posts on lodgers who are possibly relatives hit close to home in my search for information about my wife's great-grandfather. In three consecutive Scotland census reports he is listed first as boarder, then as son, and finally lodger. It took some..

My grandfather, Salvador Sanchez, was born 15 February 1921 in Mexico. It was there that he met my grandmother, Rosa Fonseca, and started a family before immigrating to the United States in 1957.

Belo, as we called him,..

Unlike the old-world monarchies of Europe, the United States has no hereditary titles. Even so, some..

On my first day working at New England Historic Genealogical Society, I noticed a collection of framed ambrotype photographs of founding members of NEHGS, taken in the 1850s. While the vast majority of the men in the photographs were in their older years, one man was..

Sometimes it starts with that picture in the attic. It falls out of its black corners and yellow cellophane as if to say, look at me, I’m here for a reason—challenging you to rediscover its past, to make the voice of its subject heard.

I think it must have happened..

I recently read a New Yorker article about the complicated status of Black members of Native American nations, which stirred my memory and prompted me to research a Native American family I once knew.

Over fifty years ago on an autumn Sunday, I met formally with Chief..

Plenty of people own Shaker furniture or have heard of Shaker-style craftsmanship, but it's less common to find someone with Shaker ancestry. There’s good reason for that: the Shakers, or the United Society of..