I have tried to make it a point in my blogs to give heartfelt thanks to indexing efforts of the New England Historic Genealogy Society (NEHGS) volunteers whenever we bring a new or updated collection online. Several people have asked me exactly how volunteers fit in..

Recently I gave a webinar about choosing a DNA test and breaking down the differences between AncestryDNA, 23andme, and FamilyTreeDNA. When it came to autosomal DNA, I included the fact that 23andme and FamilyTreeDNA provide a chromosome view of how you share DNA with..

One of my perennial and poignant brick walls is the story behind my wife Nancy’s maternal grandmother Anna Barkassy Pouget..

Enjoyable, rewarding, and complex – three words that come to mind when I describe my work at NEHGS. As researchers and writers, we have the pleasure of making discoveries and documenting..

My squirrel bins, those containers of Distractions of All Things Family, frequently offer up mysteries, usually in the form of memorabilia that make me wonder why they were kept, and why I have them.

The small, 2.5” brass-toned badge marked Augusta Emergency Unit 83 is..

In 2010 I visited the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. An exhibit that caught my eye was called Within these Walls, whichtold the stories of five families who lived in a house in Ipswich, Massachusetts for more than..

Whenever I am working in records or sites from another country – and thus not in the English language – I do my best to leave them in that language, especially if my only option for translation is that which is built into the..

The beginning of summer and the influx of tourists to the city of Boston has me thinking about a fun activity I did last year: a historic tavern tour. This was an entertaining group outing where we went on a historical tour of the city, all the while stopping at..

While I have written about reported birthdates ranging over several years, something else that happens from time to time is the reporting of death dates, especially gravestones, being off by a few years. Sometimes, when a gravestone date..

It is urban legend that I got my start doing human genealogy by tracing Thoroughbred horse pedigrees when I worked at Claiborne Farm in Kentucky in the early 1970s. I was already familiar with the five-generation pedigree chart before I got there, which was a great..