Category Archives: Spotlight

Loving Register style

Register style would help clarify family groups among descendants of my grandmother (seated, center).

I simply love Register style as a way of presenting descendants of a particular ancestor. Chris Child’s recent post made me realize just how much I love it. It is..

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A vote of confidence

Yesterday afternoon, sometime after 2 p.m., Vita Brevis marked a major milestone in the life of a blog with its one-millionth page view. Since it officially launched on 10 January 2014, with Robert Charles Anderson’s Deep Puritan Roots post, Vita Brevis has published..

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'The lofty heights'

[Author's noteThis series of excerpts from Regina Shober Gray’s diary began here.]

Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
A great feature of Regina Shober Gray’s diary is the way she translates what she sees into words that..Continue reading

A New England Hogwarts

Image from Bradford’s History “of Plimoth Plantation.” From the Original Manuscript (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1928), opposite p. 531 in the Appendix.

In 2014, I wrote a blog post about the greatness that is J.K. Rowling. My main point was that, as in your own..

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'He felt perfectly well'

[Author’s note: This series of excerpts from Regina Shober Gray’s diary began here.]

Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236
In 1878, the Grays went abroad for much of the year: it was such a momentous trip that Mrs. Gray [1] took..Continue reading

The real Molly Pitcher

Molly Pitcher at the Battle of Monmouth, June 1778. Copy of engraving by J. C. Armytage after Alonzo Chappel. Courtesy of NARA

I recently stumbled upon a reference to Molly Pitcher, a woman from Pennsylvania who fought with her husband during the Revolutionary War..

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A family tradition

Courtesy Hill Farmstead Brewery.

Last March, I made the move from Los Angeles to Boston. It was a pretty big change: not just the fact that, for about six months of the year, really cold stuff falls from the sky, but definitely the history, culture, and way of life..

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A voice from the Revolutionary War

One of the huts built for Continental soldiers later in 1780. Courtesy of Revolutionary War New Jersey, the Online Field Guide to New Jersey’s Revolutionary War Historic Sites,..
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The Parkman House

Samuel Parkman house, Bowdoin Square, Boston, by Philip Harry, 1847. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections

Among the many treasures in the Society’s collection is an extraordinarily well-preserved circa 1847 oil painting by Philip Harry of a grand Boston home that no..

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ICYMI: The Name Game

[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 4 February 2015.]

Bonus note: Vita Brevis blogger Penny Stratton is retiring from NEHGS today after ten years on the Publications team. In honor of her departure, I asked her to pick a post to run..

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