How the research is done

Every conclusion on this site — and in every client project — rests on records: censuses, church registers, tax lists, court files, deeds, newspapers, pension files, and DNA evidence that clients choose to share. A few working principles govern all of it:

Evidence over lore. Family stories are rarely invented — more often they're unanchored: true things that drifted loose from their names and dates. The work is to anchor them, and to follow the evidence even when it declines to flatter or to condemn.

Conflicts are flagged, not smoothed. When records disagree — a census and an obituary, two spellings of one name — the disagreement is noted honestly. Unverified dates are marked as such until a record settles them.

Proof is a thread, and then a tide. Single documents rarely announce the answer; certainty accumulates until no other explanation stands. And some pieces stay missing: a finished family history isn't one with no gaps — it's one where the gaps can be looked at and bridged with reasonable assumptions, stated as such.

The whole story, told with grace. Sensitive discoveries are treated as truth and part of the human tapestry — handled with care, never sensationalized, and never published without the permission of those affected.

A fuller methodology page — sources, standards, and how a client project unfolds — is being prepared.