What to us might seem a rather morbid seventeenth-century tradition was the bestowal of mourning gifts on those who took part in your funeral, such as the coffin bearers, as well as family and friends. Samuel Sewall made a list of thirty funerals at which he was a..

To be complete, the well-stocked genealogical library should include general works on our research interests. Biographical dictionaries and other compendia are useful for looking at our ancestors’ contemporaries and their activities; they often provide clues for..

Probate inventories can tell us a lot about the living conditions of our ancestors, but as they are usually difficult to read and interpret, more often than not the little details are skipped by family historians. Nearly everyone records the amount of land in the..

A month or so ago, I knew comparatively little about one of my great-grandfathers, a Baltimore architect. Most of what I knew was genealogical in nature, but I had – and have – no photographs, and I did not know much about his oeuvre, which was mostly apartment houses..