The practice of “warning out” individuals from New England communities can be traced to the mid-seventeenth..

In checking a source for an article in Mayflower Descendant, I was reminded of the need to check the various versions of early vital records. For many towns in Massachusetts, there are often three pre-1850 versions: 1) the published transcription (often called the..

When I first started researching my family I found an antique cross-stitch sampler that was passed down through my maternal grandmother’s family. I was eager to discover which of my ancestors had made it and I thought it should be easy to figure out. After all, it..

The NEHGS Library is always adding new and interesting items to our collections. These come from purchases we make, and from numerous donations to the Society.

You can keep current with additions to our collections by viewing our monthly list of new titles, available..

“She tells white lies to ice a wedding cake.”  - Margot Asquith

As students of family history, we spend our time and curiosity trying to discover the reasons why our ancestors kept so many secrets!..

In days of yore, when I was in college, locating published articles on historical topics required hours sifting through library stacks and individual journal indexes, then laboriously photocopying each page of each article. Thankfully, in today’s digital world, we have

May is Jewish Heritage Month, so in its honor I decided to look into my own Jewish heritage.

Even though I work at a genealogical society, I always felt that it was a worthless pursuit to try to trace..

I have just received the last volume in Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs’ Plymouth Colony town records series – see my earlier post on the records of Sandwich and Eastham. The Town Records of Duxbury, Bridgewater, and Dartmouth during the Time of Plymouth Colony, 1620–1692, like..

Shortly after I began work at NEHGS about ten years ago, we went into all-hands-on-deck mode. The occasion was the National Genealogical Society’s annual conference, which was in Boston that year and bringing many visitors to the building. A newbie, I was assigned the..

Behind the scenes, the NEHGS web team is hard at work preparing the searchable version of our Roman Catholic Archdiocese records. As part of that process, our volunteers create spreadsheets that associate information with a specific image file. I proofread these..