Learn how to preserve old newspaper clippings and documents at home, why newsprint crumbles, and the storage steps that stop the damage for good.

Can’t read the old handwriting in a deed, will, or ledger? Learn a proven paleography method to decode 1800s cursive and unlock your family records.

Every old house keeps a guest list. The families who raised children in its rooms, the widow who took in boarders to pay the taxes, the carpenter who added the back kitchen one summer, the couple who finally put in a bathroom where the pantry used to be, all of them left traces. Tracing the […]

An old burying ground is one of the most honest archives a community owns. Nobody edited it for publication, nobody cropped out the inconvenient, and the people recorded there were mostly ordinary residents who left no other written trace of their lives. A hillside cemetery above the Chemung, half reclaimed by lilac and myrtle, can […]

Learn how to trace the history of an old house through deeds and land records, step by step, with a practical Chemung Valley research example.

Almost every family keeps a recipe that no one can quite reproduce. It survives on a grease-spotted index card in a grandmother’s slanting hand, or as a clipping pasted into a cookbook, or as nothing written at all, just a memory of a cake that tasted a particular way at a particular kitchen table. When […]

Every community is full of people whose memories are irreplaceable, and every year some of those memories vanish unrecorded. Oral history is the practice of capturing first-hand accounts before they are lost, and it is one of the few historical activities almost anyone can do well with modest equipment and careful preparation. The difference between […]

Nearly every community has one: a handsome old building standing empty, its windows boarded, its future uncertain. It might be a former school, a mill, a railway station, a grange hall, or a downtown storefront that has outlived its original purpose. Such buildings are easy to dismiss as liabilities, and many are demolished simply because […]

Online genealogy has made it easy to assemble a family tree from the comfort of home, but the most detailed and surprising discoveries often wait in the records that have never been digitized. Many of these sit in the county courthouse, the building where the ordinary legal business of generations was recorded and preserved. Learning […]

For the historian of a community, no source captures the texture of ordinary life quite like the local newspaper. Where official records preserve the major milestones of birth, marriage, death, and property, the newspaper preserved everything in between: the church suppers, the high school games, the price of eggs, the visiting relatives, the petty crimes, […]