I find that, once I start collecting something, the collection itself tends to dictate its own expansion. Put another way, I don’t always know what will interest me until I start looking at the items on either side of the object I..

Coming from a family of active amateur photographers, the (still) new digital age of photography has significantly changed the way I look at and convey my world, its events, my life, and my family. Gone are the days of, “Oh, no, I just..

There are many stories that reside in the papers and photographs our forebears set aside to keep. These stories sometimes lack a key, but here is one that, thanks to a loving sister, retains its general outline.

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..

As genealogists, we tend to focus on the more remote past, rarely pausing to consider our parents’ or grandparents’ times in a rush to get back to 1850, or 1750, or sometime before that. Someday, of course, 1950 will seem as..

My mother was born with an unusual last name – Cottuli – which has been both a blessing and a curse for my research. The blessing is that when I find someone with that last name, they always turn out to be related. The curse is that it’s misspelled everywhere and..

There is one thing that many people know about me, and that is that when I am not busily researching family trees and helping patrons here at the New England Historic..

My grandfather’s box of family papers continues to yield treasures – and some fresh mysteries. Among the former (and the latter) are a pair of small leather traveling photo frames: one, the larger, is maroon and holds a photograph of a middle-aged woman; the other..

My ancestry is replete with American patriots, soldiers – veterans. From Anthony Morse Jr., a lieutenant in the militia at Newbury, Massachusetts, in the 1660s, to Samuel Morse, a soldier in the War of 1812; from Thomas Morse, a patriot in the American Revolution, to..

Riffing on something Chris Child wrote about collecting photos of family members in July, I thought I might do something similar with information about family burial plots. Such an exercise leans heavily on Findagrave.com (where some of the images may be found),..