Our team has skills in web design, journalism, academic research, languages and the performing arts. We can start with a single name and build your family tree. We'll start by interviewing you to see what you know of your family history, and then we'll search for documentary proof of every link.
Interviews
You might be surprised at how much you and your family know already. We'll conduct a relaxed and friendly interview - you may not realise the significance of everything that you know. We can make educated guesses at national and regional origins, spot key bits of missing information, search for birth, marriage and death documents and establish where we should search for the facts that you're curious about.
We know form experience that some people like lists, charts, dates and documents. There are plenty of others who just don't think that way, but who have stories and memories. We can flesh out these stories, order them in time, spot inconsistencies and piece everything together again.
We're expert at teasing out the details and using them to create new leads to follow. We'll record and partially transcribe our conversation, and then write a report explaining what we should do with the information, how long it might take to research and what it will cost. You're in charge - do you want to find one missing relative or grow a whole tree?
Individual searches
We've had years of experience in building the life stories of individuals from official documents, letters, books and photographs. We'll try to prove every fact, to avoid the mistakes that we see on so many online trees. We'll never cut and paste, and we're proud of both our rigour and our intuition.
One of our most satisfying cases brought together a mother and her child, adopted years before. We dug through service records, school alumni societies, university archives, telephone directories, newspaper reports and institutional libraries to complete the chain of links. Finally we could put the client in touch with excited relatives. We even appeared in a new academic book in Italy!
Not every case is so complex. We've searched for lost 'black sheep', travelling preachers, river pilots and farm labourers. We've researched important historical figures and people who left barely any trace on the wider world. As they say, no job too big or too small.
Building your family tree
This is the classic way to organise your thoughts and see your lineage on the page. We can help continue or disentangle your existing tree, or we can start from scratch. If you've run into dead ends, or have found contradictions that you can't resolve, we can help. It happens to everyone, and we may find answers.
We don't rely on published trees on the big family history websites. Time and again we see the results of cutting and pasting, making assumptions that the trees are accurate. You might get lucky, or you might have found a string of people who have just copied what they found. We'll check what we find at every stage and set you straight again.
Technology has moved on too - there is plenty of software that lets you view your ancestry in multiple views. The classic branch tree arrangement has grown into 3D interactive displays. You can also generate ancestor or descendant charts, fan charts where relationships spread like ripples from a central person, distribution maps where you see your family's geographic locations, plus a number of others. We can print from our software or recommend that you install something suitable to which we'll export our work. A tree with photographs for each individual brings the data to life - these are the people that helped to make you who you are.
We'll provide all of our source documents and transcriptions, and the steps we took so that you can find things again or work more on them.
What can we do for you?
Who do you want to find? How far back in time do you want to see? Where in the world are you curious about?
Email us, or use the chat button, and let's talk.
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