About

I want to help you chip away at those tough family history brick walls.

Brick walls are almost always built from either poor assumptions or laziness.

I have solutions that can help with both.

I’ve been slowly building my family tree for more than five years. I had a headstart in the form of piles of research accumlated by my parents and my grandparents. (This is both a blessing and a curse.) But I quickly ran face first into brick walls, people whose parents I couldn’t figure out, mysteries that I couldn’t quite solve.

And I don’t claim to have broken through all of my walls yet - after all, as soon as you convince yourself you’ve found one set of parents, there are four more parents waiting to be hunted.

But I’ve found lots of clues, solved some tough cases that generations of previous researchers had struggled with, and learned tons along the way.

I want to share with you what I’ve learned, so that maybe you can chip away at your own walls.

I learned that I make a lot of bad assumptions that get me stuck in my research. Assumptions about:

• what records I should be able to find
• who someone’s children were
• where someone “should” have been living

And I also had to admit that I created a lot of my own problems by being lazy:

• too lazy to read every page of the record
• too lazy to go GET the record I needed when it only exists in a physical archive
• too lazy to learn about what’s available and where to find it and how to use it once I’ve found it

Family history research is fun and entertaining and can also be incredibly frustrating. But I have tricks to maybe make it a little easier.