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.
Surname Origins
Surname Origins
The Hundred Rolls
John Culverd of Oxford held a cellar with a solar in 1279, and the jury that recorded it admitted three times over that it did not know how. An early bearer of the family name, honestly unconnected - and why that distinction is the whole method.
Surname Origins
The Captain of the Dove
A dove-named man, a ship called Dove, and the historian who caught them both before the tide went out.
Family History
Why We're Collver, Not Culver
From Old English 'culfre' to a loyalist preacher's land grant on Lake Erie: the 750-year paper trail behind the Collver family's unusual spelling.