About

I have 30 years of experience tracing families in the United States, including immigration, migration, military service, as well as DNA research.

One of my earliest memories is jumping out of my parents’ van as we stopped at a cemetery. We were on the hunt for some family – my mom was working on a family history for her family. She and my dad would go through the cemeteries, the records, the libraries, and conduct interviews with family members. I don’t remember all of those moments, but I remember the time spent at cemeteries.

This quest that my parents had never ended. We were always visiting family, visiting cemeteries, learning the stories from the past. And when I was in the 5th grade, I started my own research. I wrote letters to extended family members – my parents’ own first cousins – and asked them for the information about their family, descendancy information to extend our tree forward in time. That was the start of my personal work as a genealogist. I was working in paper family group sheets and pedigree trees. I spent hours at the courthouse and the local state historical society going through dusty, heavy books, scrolling thru microfilm and learning about the United States census, newspaper research, vital records.

In college, I majored in U.S. History and American Indian Studies, focused on the Plains nations. I worked part-time in the University’s Oral History Center, transcribing interviews done with pioneers and tribal elders. And worked on my genealogy research late at night on the still-new internet message boards.

But when it is all said and done, my passion lies in genealogy and has since I was 10 years old. I have done research in libraries, paging through dusty tomes, turning microfilm reels in the machines, and now I enjoy the research that can be done online at home in my pajamas. When I am not working on my own or my husband’s lines, I am researching those of my friends or my in-laws; to gain practice on a different area of research or just to travel down another path of research after hitting yet another brick wall on my own. Being able to show a friend where his great-grandfather lived after locating him in the census, and then being able to map it and see that the house still stands and we could view it on Google streetview – the look of smile and wonder on his face was the best gift I’ve received in a long time.