Your family tree is more than a collection of names and dates. Every name represents a life—and every life has a story waiting to be discovered.

Trace Your New England Roots is a genealogy and history YouTube channel that takes viewers beyond the family tree to investigate the records, DNA evidence, mysteries, family stories, and historical events that shaped the lives of our ancestors.

Created and hosted by genealogist, author, and historical researcher Eric J. Ostroff, the channel combines practical genealogy instruction with historical investigation and storytelling. Viewers learn how to find and evaluate records, overcome genealogy brick walls, analyze DNA matches, recognize misleading evidence, challenge long-accepted family traditions, and build family histories based on evidence rather than assumptions.

The channel explores everything from autosomal DNA, Y-DNA, genetic genealogy, triangulation, endogamy, migration patterns, vital records, probate records, wills, land records, census records, and overlooked archival sources to some of the most difficult questions family historians encounter: What happens when the records contradict one another? What if generations of researchers have identified the wrong ancestor? What if a DNA result challenges the accepted family tree? And what do you do when an ancestor simply seems to disappear?

But Trace Your New England Roots goes beyond genealogy instruction.

Through deeply researched stories drawn from historical and genealogical evidence, the channel brings viewers into the world their ancestors actually inhabited. Episodes explore colonial New England, the Salem Witch Trials, King Philip's War, early New England communities, migration, forgotten individuals, family scandals, historical mysteries, and ordinary men and women whose lives survive only in fragments scattered across centuries-old records.

Some episodes begin with a single document. Others begin with a DNA match, an old family story, an unidentified ancestor, or a mystery that has remained unresolved for generations. The evidence is followed wherever it leads—sometimes confirming what a family has believed for decades and sometimes overturning the story completely.

That combination of genealogy, history, investigation, and storytelling is at the heart of Trace Your New England Roots.

Whether you're beginning your first family tree, trying to solve a stubborn brick wall, exploring your New England ancestry, learning how to use DNA evidence, or simply fascinated by the forgotten stories of early America, Trace Your New England Roots invites you to look beyond the names on the tree and discover the people behind them.

Because history isn't only something that happened centuries ago. It's something your family lived.

Trace Your New England Roots

Where History Starts With Your Family.

Click the button below to visit the TRACE YOUR NEW ENGLAND ROOTS YouTube Channel!