My sister, Erin, said it best. We stood on her front porch watching fireworks on New Year’s Eve after learning that Grandma Lois had just...

Ruth Bates Harris may be one of the most significant people of which you have never heard. I discovered her story as I researched a story...

As I write, I'm preparing to teach a class about World War II to a group of homeschooled third through fifth graders. Using picture...

Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved Little House on the Prairie series is an amalgamation of memory, fact, and fiction. As recorded in Little...

Brick walls. Every genealogist runs into one sooner or later. The dead-end of a trail of evidence with no obvious solution in sight. When...

As I was growing up, I frequently heard about my great-grandfather William "Bill" Morris's days as a vaudeville stagehand in Muskegon,...

Over the past several weeks on Facebook I have been chronicling my progress in organizing my grandparents' collection of family...

"Matriarchs" established that the women in our family are the storytellers. That doesn't mean the men have taught us any less. Their...

What makes one family a clan and another family a loosely connected network of households–if they even know each other? Is it simply a...

It was Wayne Winkler's observation about the fluidity of Melungeon race identity in the United States Federal censuses that prompted me...

Fort Foote occupied what felt like a remote place four miles south of Alexandria and eight miles south of Washington, D.C. With no access...

We all have them. The stories at which our grandparents only hint and won't satisfy us with answers, usually because they are too painful...

One of the most important reasons for researching family history is to create a deeper emotional connection to family by better...

This blog post is for my mother who has been suffering a twinge of inferiority complex since the discovery of my father's illustrious...

Since I last posted about my own DNA results, a number of my family members have participated in our family DNA project. The results are...

The deeper I dig into DNA genealogical study the more convinced I become that race is an artificial construct of the human imagination,...

Old College View Seventh-day Adventist church about 1945-1946, corner of South 49th Street and Prescott Avenue. Today I feel compelled...

Often just identifying ancestors back to the 1600s or earlier is a major achievement. Understanding something about the time period and...

After all of the time I spent on my Nantucket Origins post, I hadn't planned to write again so soon about my New England ancestors....

For the month of November I had thought it would be fun to revisit the Puritan origins of my family. But the process of reviewing the...