The holiday season is underway and soon families will gather for meals and gift giving. With many relatives under one roof, this is a great time for genealogists to ask questions about holiday traditions practiced in the past or to try to learn more about the family.

Looking back almost 40 years I can’t imagine not crossing paths with Ron Spagnardi, founder and publisher of Modern Drummer magazine. We were both drummers, entrepreneurs. Ron in New Jersey, me in New York. At about age 34, Spagnardi saw the success of a 10-year-old magazine devoted to guitarists, "Guitar Player," and wondered, why not publish a magazine devoted to drummers?

Earlier in the month, on the day we all went to the polls, Mississipians held a special election for the seat left vacated by the resignation of U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran. Four candidates ran for the seat, each running on a nonpartisan ticket line, with two main competitors -- Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democrat Mike Espy -- taking up the lion's share of votes. The other two were minor candidates with no realistic chance of winning.

Maine’s attorney general straddles two worlds. Elected by the Legislature, the attorney general performs executive branch duties. The attorney general is the state’s top law enforcement officer, but also acts as the lawyer for state government’s departments and agencies.

I’ve voted every Election Day for 49 years. This year was the first time my vote didn't count.

Want to hear an interesting fact about the 2018 election? Shawn Moody received the fourth-most votes for governor in the nearly 200 years of Maine history.

Charity is no replacement for sound policy, especially if you’re the governor of the state. In his radio address this week, Gov. Paul LePage touts the success of an annual food drive organized through the Blaine House that helps people in need around the holidays.

I recently came across a chart of major epidemics in the United States starting in 1794 and ending in 1918. The author was emphasizing that many people thought to have “disappeared” from records were actually victims of diseases.

Grafton, who turns five mid-December, visited Eileen and I this Veterans Day. We had not seen each other in weeks. Our weekly day to babysit each other ended months ago when Grafton and his mom moved to Brunswick, and he started pre-K school.

In a surprise to exactly no one, Bruce Poliquin filed a lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday, challenging Maine's ranked-choice voting system. Poliquin has a duty to his campaign, the plurality of his constituents that voted for him, and to the country to file this suit, and file it exactly when he did.

There can be no question that Maine saw a blue wave on Election Day. Voters elected Democrat Janet Mills as governor, flipped the state Senate from Republican to Democratic control and expanded the Democratic majority in the state House of Representatives.

It’s November 7, 2018. The morning after the 2018 midterm elections, the first day of campaign season for the 2020 general elections.

Going into Tuesday's election, there were a lot of predictions. A lot of polls. A lot of prognostication. The conventional wisdom was that we would see a Democratic tidal wave across the nation from the House to the Senate to state governorships.

Perhaps more than any election year in my lifetime, the press has come under intense pressure and attack. Deemed the “enemy of the people,” the media is being forced to adapt to a political climate in which a significant portion of the people have given up on the idea of truth and facts.

When it comes to interpreting old handwriting most genealogists agree it’s a difficult task. I’ve done my share of puzzling over words that I’m sure were created by a malevolent clerk chuckling over the trouble he was creating for future genealogists. For example, I recently came across a word on an old marriage record that was nothing more than a series of bumps. Eventually, I was able to figure out it was supposed to be “Lincoln.”

In a book of collected letters, written by former President Herbert Hoover to American children, I was impressed with one letter to a kid who had written to the President of the United States with a question about how government can best help U.S. citizens.

Recently, I had dinner with three very informed, intelligent, politically savvy friends, all of whom -- just for the record -- happen to be Democrats. Naturally the conversation drifted toward Election Day, and the same question that I have been asked thousands of times this year, and thousands of times in each of the preceding election years, was again asked of me.

The knock on Janet Mills has never been that she’s soft on crime. In fact, during the Democratic primary, I would say that her law and order credentials were a sticking point for some of the more liberal members of the party. And they were considered a strength in the general election.