It is difficult to imagine leaving everything you have ever known behind. Yet millions of our..

For my 2013 book on the Saltonstall family, I wrote 23 biographical essays on family members, from Gilbert^B Saltonstall (grandfather of the American immigrant) to Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, the legendary Washington Post editor. The Saltonstalls have produced a..

The Social Security Death Index (SSDI) is a widely used collection for modern genealogical research. It is composed of information provided by the Social Security Administration (SSA) for those individuals (with Social Security numbers) who..

Memorable for her encounter with Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Mistress Hibbins was not simply a figment of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s imagination. Long a controversial woman in Boston, she was a real person who in May 1656 was sentenced to death for the crime of..

When I was in elementary school, my class went on a field trip to the Old Village Cemetery in Dedham, Massachusetts, my hometown. I remember running around trying to complete tasks, such as finding the earliest death date and the oldest age listed on a headstone, as..

In April 2009, the New England Historic Genealogical Society presented Mayor Thomas Michael Menino of Boston (1942–2014) with a..

Alice Lake of Dorchester became the second person tried and executed in Boston as a witch. While few details of her offenses survive – she was executed circa 1650 – she had two potent strikes against her: she had committed fornication prior to marriage, and she was..

The legacy of Salem-born author Nathaniel Hawthorne is that of a great American writer, one whose tales of New England life and Puritanism were a focal point of the..

Overshadowed by the hysteria that gripped the townspeople of Salem in 1692, Boston’s considerable witchcraft record has received relatively little attention. From the late 1630s to the 1690s, the town intermittently fell into witch-hunting fervor as accusations..

Having lived in Hingham the majority of my life, and with ancestors who lived there three centuries ago, I ought to have a good grasp of the Hingham records – but not so much. The problem begins with the fact that the Hingham vital records have not been published. For..