One day nearly two years ago, I entered a bookstore in my hometown of Westerly, Rhode Island. I had heard the store would be going out of business soon and wanted to take one last look around. After a few minutes, I came..

For the past two weeks, many NEHGS staff members celebrated birthdays, bringing to mind my birthday celebration last year. At the restaurant, our waiter announced my birthday to..

In my last Vita Brevis post, I wrote about some of the best sources to help identify your Loyalist ancestors. But before the Loyalists fled to Canada after the American Revolution, another important group settled Maritime Canada:..

Readers have asked how to cite Internet sources. Confession, I don’t really know the answer – and I don’t think many others do, either. It is a new, still-evolving discipline complicated by the transitory nature of the beast, where links to pages get changed and/or..

Some Vita Brevis readers have sent me really nice samples of what they are doing using the Early New England Families Study Project format model. Thanks, you are all “on point” and doing a great job. Plenty of questions have been sent, too, so let’s address some of..

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),..

While working on the Early New England Families Study Project sketch on..

Nine Vita Brevis readers took the plunge and sent in a set of complete answers to Monday’s research challenge. Thank you all for participating!

The winner had ten answers correct out of eleven; not a single person identified..

I tried this for July 4, and thought it might be fun to try it again: I have several photos of Hollywood actors and actresses associated with a director and a film, and I wonder if some Vita Brevis readers can square the circle and..