Family History
The Family Business
Run a finger down the records asking what they did for a living: bread, beer, wheels, shoes, land, flour, cheese, shirts, and the telephone — three centuries of the licensed trade a town cannot do without.
Michigan
Family History
The Jabez Staff
The oldest thing this family owns that you can still pick up is a walking stick, and it corrected me.
Family History
Mary Kept the Books
Four words for her, eleven paragraphs for the men — and what her own hometown newspaper knew that her family’s historian did not.
Family History
The Names We Kept and the Ancestors We Chased
A form letter, a mail-merge number, and a woman eighteen months dead — and what four hundred years of this family's given names say about where Americans decided they lived.
Family History
Doves on the Wire
A departure this week from the eighteenth century: a family story that surfaced in the last few days, from correspondence with cousins of the Climax, Michigan branch and a week in the newspaper and census records. It reaches from Munger, in Bay County, to the village of Climax in Kalamazoo
genealogy
The Family Pamphlet: The Collver-Culver Genealogy, 1630 to 1916
A reader asked where to find the rarest book in the family. Here it is — all eleven pages — together with the 1976 obituary pasted inside that tells you exactly whose shelf it came from.