The Genealogist Detective and Storyteller
The Genealogist Detective and Storyteller
Let me find the details about your special ancestor! Allow me to tell their story!
What was your 3rd great grandfather like?
Who did your great grandmother’s cousin know?
Were your 5th great grandmother and her siblings raised by their uncle?
What kind of land did your 2nd great grandfather have? (Where, how much?)
Where did one of these families relocate to?
Where did your grandparents come from - what ship and when? Did they come together?
Did you have a Civil War ancestor? And did he survive?
Who are your ancestors on your paternal grandmother's side?
Have you always been told you were related to or descended from James Madison?
Specializing in writing stories about an ancestor or historical relative you may be curious to know more about, or a family group. I can put this target person in context with their family and events of the times. I will do my best to allow you to get to know this person or family.
Obviously, the more people I am looking into, the more time and research will be required. We will discuss and communicate about what you want me to be looking into. I enjoy being able to research other people your ancestor(s) may have interacted with, but this would be a more surface-type research than the deep dive on your target person/people. We may discuss the need or not of additional research on the periphery people. The exciting thing is, you never know where the research will take us!
I can research a particular family line for you, and create a family tree.
I can dig into American family lore and determine the viability of such claims.
Were you left with piles of research from Aunt Mindy who did a ton of research on the family? Did she do her due diligence and find the right people? Or was she stymied by brick walls and could not determine who someone's parents were?
Your ancestors were more than just names and dates. Who were they? What challenges did they have? What were their lives like? Were they important in their community? What did they do to survive? These are the types of answers I try to answer, and we can get a feel for our ancestors by knowing something about their lives. Who they lived next to, where they lived, where they moved to. Personally, I want to know who my ancestors were. As much as I can. Without diaries, we cannot get totally inside their heads. But, we can have an idea about some of their thoughts by the way they lived their lives.
We can't really know their hopes and dreams... but we can learn some what they accomplished. Our forefathers (and foremothers) lived their lives just as we do. With love and hope, pain and regret. For good or bad. And perhaps we can understand ourselves better, if we got to know something about what our ancestors went through so that we could have the life we have.
ALL THIS is what I have always wanted to know about my ancestors. Who WERE THEY? What were they like? I have a current on-going project that has told me a lot about some of my ancestors. I have a lot of answers... and I have even more questions. But, I definitely have a better feel for these people are who came before me. The people who helped to make who I am today.
This is what I can offer you. A story to get to know who your ancestors were.
