“This is war, Peacock. Casualties are inevitable. You can not make an omelet without breaking eggs, every cook will tell you that.”

~ Martin Mull, in the role of Colonel Mustard in Clue (1985)

When my mother started down the genealogy trail many decades ago, my grandfather was quick to tell her about the famous World War II flying ace in the family, related through his aunt, Nancy Alice (Christy) Carl. She had..

Many years ago, now, I visited a cousin outside Baltimore with the marvelous name of Camille Steward Marié (1918-2002).[1] He was the son of one of my great-grandfather’s first cousins, but because of the way our..

Sometimes – as Chris Child and Jeff Record know – one gets drawn back to the same subject matter only to find new patterns. (I would venture to say many other genealogists know this dynamic well.) For me,..

Growing up in a suburb outside San Francisco, my family vacationed in Lake Tahoe every summer. I remember driving by Donner Lake and driving over Donner Pass. I..

If you have ever tried to track down distant cousins, especially in foreign countries, you..

When I have given lectures and consultations on migrations into and out of New England, a frequent topic of discussion regards the question of whether the migration was religiously or economically motivated. For the period of The Great Migration into New England from..

Several months back, Chris Child and I started playing a game we’ve dubbed "Genealogical Clue." Playing a good game of it can be quite fun and challenging. Largely, it’s a game whereby we attempt to locate an individual in our..

Finding Aaron, it turned out, meant finding Francis, a family connection in my own backyard. I’ve written several posts about my genealogical journey to learn about my maternal grandfather, John Joseph Osborne, and, in the course of that journey, I discovered ancestral..