Do you want to discover your personal past?

Has your genealogical research gotten stuck?
Do you want to know your family’s history but can’t do the research yourself?
Is there information you cannot access?
Are you hoping there are sources that you just haven’t been able to find?
Do you lack the time to go from research to polished result?
Need help understanding Swedish, German or French?
Do you have a genealogy project that is just too big for the time you have?
Is there a story in your personal past that deserves a professional touch?

Exploring your family history is a fascinating and wonderful endeavor but it doesn’t always go smoothly. Do you lack the time to develop the skills and accomplish the amount and depth of research that you want? You may get stuck with some particular problem. You might sense a story hiding in your family’s past that you can’t quite tease out. Maybe you’re having trouble with a foreign language or difficulty finding records. Perhaps you simply want to know who grandpa was or if a family legend might have some truth to it after all. Maybe like many people you just have a general curiosity that you cannot satisfy.

You can get in touch with what I call your personal past. Lives can be extracted and reconstructed from a pile of old letters, a family Bible, a drawer of photographs and the records that the people in your personal past left behind in scattered archives. You can learn about the lives that came before you and preserve them. Their stories can be reassembled and told with style.

It is one thing to want to know the answers or to sense a tale that ought to be explored. It is another to know where to look for information, how to gather it, organize it, interpret and follow every little hint, explain the inconsistencies, record what has been learned, and to have the time to do it all. Many people that seem relevant will turn out to be red herrings and it can be a challenge to separate the important from the erroneous.

Putting it all together can be daunting.  Presenting it well is an art.

You may just need someone who has the skills and can give the project the attention that it requires. Ideally, what you have should be preserved and cataloged and its information extracted and organized. A professional can hunt down archival records and local history and make sense of the results.

What Can I Do for You?

Thanks to a pair of my aunts, I’ve been seriously researching family history since I was eleven years old. Earning a doctorate in particle physics taught me to organize and complete truly large and complex research projects. Whether a project is large or small, I work hard to find and organize the information, get the logic correct, and properly document the results.

I enjoy going several steps farther as well. Once the facts are uncovered, telling the stories is important. I love to reconstruct as much as possible of the people and families that I research and uncover the connections to history that anchor the personal stories to the wider world. I relish figuring out not just who, when and where but why and how as well.

I’ve helped clients with many activities. Here are just a few.

• Genealogical and historical research in The United States, Canada, Sweden and Germany,
• Transcribing, preserving and cataloging hundreds of 19th century letters then extracting the genealogical clues and the stories held within,
• Explaining the intricacies of specially folded love poem from the 1840s,
• Researching relevant historical events to put other research into context,
• Dating photographs and identifying the people and places they show,
• Photographing and researching heirlooms and artifacts,
• Transcribing and translating German and Swedish including Gothic script,
• Discovering and researching the stories of families, then writing and editing them,
• Designing and writing family history books full of stories and history, illustrated with documents, heirlooms, photographs and maps.

Whether you need a few hours of research or have a large project in mind contact me and we can go over your family history problems and goals then discuss how I can help you meet them.

-Dr. Daniel Hubbard