As genealogists, we can become quite proprietary about our research – there can be a sense that our work on the far-flung branches of our family trees gives us a kind of ownership of the past. Recently, I’ve experienced another sort of ownership, that claimed by the..

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Just shy of my seventieth birthday, I finally made it to Salt Lake City. I am a notoriously bad traveler (with a tendency toward such things as sciatica, migraines, and hives), but the occasion was the annual meeting of the American Society of Genealogists, and since..

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Next weekend, Bill Griffeth and I will be speaking at the Brattleboro Literary Festival on DNA and genealogy, and the surprise results described in his book The Stranger in My Genes. For those who are not are familiar with the book, it all started when DNA results were..

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The question came up after last week’s post about the length of mourning periods between remarriages in seventeenth-century New England. It has always been my (undocumented) impression that the traditional one-year mourning period was usually observed except for..

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The Civil War was drawing to a close, but there remained much suffering in store for Regina Shober Gray [1] and her circle:

61 Bowdoin Street, Boston, Sunday, 12 February 1865: Tomorrow..

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As Hurricane Harvey headed for the Gulf Coast of Texas this past month, my thoughts turned toward a distant connection of mine commemorated in an old Indianola, Texas, cemetery:

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Recently, I was prompted to take a ‘second look’ at my wife’s grandfather, Horace Fenton Bloodgood. Fenton married my wife’s grandmother, a young Spanish girl named Magdalena Murrieta,[1] in Buena Vista, Sonora, Mexico, in 1908..

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As my grandfather[1] prepared to graduate from college, he was ready to cast off academics and explore the world instead of following his father into a law..

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Fraternal organizations are not as commonplace for most people today as they were back in the mid-1800s on through the twentieth century. Our ancestors joined these groups for camaraderie, financial support regarding burials, insurance, and more. There were hundreds of..

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Even as she followed the last weeks of the Civil War in the press during the winter of 1865, Mrs. Gray [1] found time to contribute to her daughter’s happiness:

61 Bowdoin Street, Boston,..

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