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, Mi...

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

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

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 fu...

It was Wayne Winkler's observation about the fluidity of Melungeon race identity in the United States Federal censuses that prompted me t...

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 understan...

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

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

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

Not long ago my cousins Karen and Errol (whose paternal grandmother, Blanche, was a sister to my great-grandfather, Clint Fox) had the di...

Fact checking family traditions can be pretty simple, especially when they are related to well-documented events. Several family traditio...