A steep climb in Chittenden’s rocky Horton Cemetery brings us to a large memorial stone inscribed like two faces of the same coin.

A monument with the name “Christmas” carved at its base in St. Alphonsus Cemetery in Pittsford commands attention. Who was this family?

Matilda Billings sounds deceptively like a Yankee name—but we know that was neither her true first nor last name.

What started out as an inquiry into solving one man’s changed surname unexpectedly linked three distantly related families, with variant spellings of their last name, to their common ancestral couple in Québec.

Unmasking one French-Canadian surname often leads to another through family associations.

Before the Civil War, with only one other married couple named Naylor born in Canada living in central Vermont, it led me to hypothesize the name originally had been Cloutier, from the French word clou, meaning nail.