In August I had the pleasure of conducting a webinar entitled “Top 10 Published Resources for Early New England Research.” Given the tremendous genealogical interest in this time period and for this geographic area, I thought Vita Brevis readers might enjoy a series of..

“See if you can find your photo in Ancestry’s updated yearbook collection,” they said. “It will be fun,” they said.

Every day as August began to wind down, there was someone on my Facebook timeline who was sharing their school photo as found in Ancestry’s U.S. School..

In settling the North American continent, the British established their first permanent colony in Virginia. Since then, its population has seen many migrations within and through the colony and then state. Its northern neighbors,..

A leaf hint on Ancestry can often lead one to additional records of the person you are researching. Other times, it might lead to interesting “near” matches, while occasionally it may lead you down an entertaining, but wild goose chase..

Many researchers find the Mid-Atlantic region intimidating. However, with so many of our ancestors passing through at some point, it really is worth going through the effort to find resources. The Mid-Atlantic region..

We are heading into a beautiful season for visiting the three northern New England states. Should your research take you to New Hampshire, Vermont, or Maine, you may really enjoy stopping by their state historical..

Sometimes we need to follow, quite literally, the paper trail when we want to learn more about a particular family group. Even in this digital age, not everything can be accessed from a computer. Perhaps the key to..

In the last post I talked about Massachusetts court records in general. Now let’s look closer at some examples from Middlesex County.

For the earliest records, the easiest entry point is the abstracts made by Thomas Wyman in the mid-nineteenth-century that are..

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 26 April 2017.]

Reading Alicia Crane Williams’s post on Sex in Middlesex reminded me of another great work by Roger Thompson – Cambridge Cameos – Stories of Life in Seventeenth-Century New England,..

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 17 March 2017.]

As one would imagine from the title, Roger Thompson’s most popular work (see my last post) is Sex in Middlesex, Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699.[1] First, a few..