Over the last 15 years or so, when not working on design projects, I spent a significant portion of my time researching my family history and digging into my family roots. Along the way I have been able to help a number of people burst through some brick walls or assist them in laying a foundation for their own journey of discovery.
In genealogy, you should know what type of research your consultant has conducted in the past and where he or she has researched. Vital records, court records, land records, &c. can vary tremendously from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. As for myself? My expertise primarily falls within the Commonwealths of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, where I have extensive experience with records in the Philadelphia and Appalachian regions, and the Connecticut River valley, respectively. I have also done significant work in Wisconsin, upstate New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. I have spent many a day in many a courthouse and cemetery looking for vital records (birth, marriage, and death), along with property records, obituaries, and will/estate records. I have also spent a fair bit of time in libraries looking through newspaper archives for what I call the flesh on the skeleton. Sometimes, we may only find the birth and death dates for individuals, but if we can attach stories, it fills out the person’s character and history in a more relatable fashion.
Finally, my pre-American roots reach back into Ireland, England, and eastern Slovakia, where I have visited to dig into the roots of the Carpatho–Rusyn people, a small Slavic group who originates in the Carpathian Mountains straddling the borders of present-day Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
I spent several years researching a Massachusetts ancestor, Jacob Miller of Northampton, Massachusetts, about whom I wrote a biographical sketch. You can find it in Volume 5 of the Western Massachusetts Families in 1790, edited by the late Helen Schatvet Ullman.
As part of my work documenting my family’s roots in western Pennsylvania on ganisterpa.com, I also wrote about a man who prompted many questions in that town: John Miller. You can find his biographical sketch here.