Dec 31, 2025

Genealogy has a built-in problem that never goes away. You are trying to rebuild real lives from records that real people created, and people get things wrong. Sometimes the mistake is innocent, like a clerk mishearing a name or a census taker writing down a guess. Sometimes the mistake is intentional, like...

Dec 26, 2025

Genealogy teaches you something early. The record is rarely clean. Ink blots. Misspelled names. Ages that shift from census to census. People who appear, disappear, then show up again decades later with no explanation. When you study the past long enough, you stop expecting perfection. You start expecting the truth to...

Dec 25, 2025

All month, we have looked at how different places celebrate the season, with food, songs, family gatherings, church services, and small customs that show up year after year. Today, we are going to close the series by going straight to the center of it.

I am going to read the Christmas story.

Before I start, here is the...

Dec 24, 2025

Well, two big reasons show up in the history.

One reason is a theological calculation that shows up early. A Christian writer named Sextus Julius Africanus (early 200s) argued that Jesus was conceived on March 25 and was born nine months later on December 25.  

Another reason is the Roman winter season. By...

Dec 23, 2025

In Poland, Christmas takes a different form than in many places. The most significant family moment often happens on Christmas Eve, not Christmas morning. That Christmas Eve gathering is called Wigilia, and in many homes it is the main event of the season. Even people who are not very religious still keep Wigilia...