A Selection of Past Cases

The Williams Siblings

Based on a couple of photographs in his possession, my client believed that one of his grandfather's siblings had emigrated to America. The challenge was that his grandfather, born in South Wales, was a Williams - a very common Welsh surname!

By painstakingly tracing each of the 10 siblings (with many red herrings along the way!), I was able to work out that it was in fact a nephew of his grandfather who emigrated to Canada.

For me, the most interesting part of this case was a 1911 census return which has been filled in incorrectly. The 27-year old householder recorded that he had ten children, five still living. I was eventually able to piece together that he was living in his deceased parents' home, and that his parents had ten children, five of whom were still living in the house.

This was a brick wall case that required a short extension.

Balthasar de Wolf

This was a really fun case. My client knew that her ancestor, Balthasar de Wolf, had emigrated to America at some point before 1636 and wanted to know where he had been born.

After three hours' research, I was able to show that Balthasar was born in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and ended up in America due to his uncle's connections with the West India Company.

Another three hours' research allowed me to follow his mother's family back another 3 generations as they fled Spain for Antwerp and then Antwerp for Leiden and Amsterdam, before heading to New York.

The key to this case turned out to be the fact that my client's DNA test had shown her to have Saphardic Jewish ancestry. While Balthasar was baptised Christian, his mother's family were Jewish. I found learning more about the cryptic Jewish community of the Netherlands fascinating!

This was a brick wall package, followed by 3 extra hours at base rate.

The Baljet Family

This was a very traditional case. The client sent me everything she knew about her Dutch grandparents, and I took it from there! I was able to trace this family line through many generations, eventually leading back to Guilliaume Baljet, who was born in around 1640 in Lille, France.

My favourite part of this case was finding a couple who moved to Bergen in Norway, had four children there, and then returned to their hometown in Friesland as if nothing had ever happened!

This was a two line package.

Gerrit Wiersma & Antje Lemstra

As with the Baljet family, this was a straight-forward case. My client knew nothing about her maternal ancestors beyond her grandparents. In 12 hours of research, I was able to add 332 people to her family tree and get one line all the way back to 1716.

This family came from Friesland, where it was common practice to name your child after your parents. However, more than once there were no sons born. Instead of rejecting the tradition, they found ways to 'feminise' the grandfather's name for the third and fourth daughters. I really enjoyed the imaginative and unusual names this created, like Johaneske and Roelfkje.

This was a two line package.

The Walter Siblings

My client knew that her great-grandfather was one of nine sons, and that he emigrated from Bristol (UK) to Australia as an adult. She wanted me to find out what had happened to his brothers and parents.

This turned out to be an incredibly adventurous family! Three of the brothers died in Australia, while one died in Shanghai and another travelled to modern day Guyana.

I developed a soft spot for the youngest son. While all the others who survived childhood eventually joined the merchant navy in some capacity or other, he decided to break family tradition and become an accountant.

The client then came back to me and asked me to do a similar project looking at the parents and siblings of her great-grandmother. Once again, this led to the navy, as her great-grandmother's uncle was a Vice-Admiral who had various nieces living with him at any given moment. However, this time the siblings didn't move any further away than Devon.

This was two brick wall packages back to back.

Redmond McDonald

Similar to Balthasar de Wolf, my client knew that his ancestor, Redmond McDonald, had emigrated to the US in 1840 with his parents, Philip and Judith. All he wanted was some proof of Philip or Redmond in Ireland. While I ultimately wasn't able to find definitive proof of this, I was able to find strong evidence pointing to the family living in a particular town. I was then able to put the client in touch with the local history society to see if they had any documentation which wasn't available digitally. Fingers crossed they find something!

This was a brick wall package

The Kuipers Family

In this case, the client had already built out his family tree using his own research and AI generated hints on Ancestry. He wanted me to check the research to see if it was all accurate.

As well as correcting various smaller details, such as dates and the odd missing child who died in infancy, there were also six points at which I was able to prove that someone had been assigned the wrong parentage and thus the tree followed the wrong family line.

This was my largest report to date, totalling 101 pages!

After fixing these errors, the client then came back to me and asked me to fill in the names and dates of direct line ancestors to the ninth generation, so that he would have a neat fan chart to print out. This I was mostly able to do, barring a couple of lines where someone was born illegitimately.

This was a professional eye package, followed by a further 12 hours at base rate.

Elsie Flynn

This case related to an older client who knew that his mother, Elsie, had been adopted and wanted to know if it would be possible to find her birth family.

Fortunately it turned out to be very easy. I was able to show that his mother had been orphaned at the age of two and adopted by her parents' next door neighbours.

After her adoptive mother died, Elsie returned to live with her now grown-up birth sister.

This was a brick wall package.

Teresa Lena

This was a case with a very simple end goal - to prove that Teresa Lena had been born in Italy and that she did not acquire Dutch citizenship.

I was able to track down her baptism record in Cordovado, Italy. Using the Dutch IND archive I was able to show that she never applied for Dutch citizenship.

Using a leftover half hour of the three hours' research time, I was also able to track down Teresa's grandparents.

This was a brick wall package.

A Dutch-American Female Line

This was another case where the research had already been done. The client had used published genealogies to follow just the women in her family line from daughter to mother.

My task was to check the veracity of the published genealogies and confirm how confident I was that each connection along the family line was accurate.

This meant dealing with some very early American colonial records, before turning my attention to the Netherlands in the C17th.

This was a professional eye package.

Lilly & James McKenzie

This case is my white whale. When I took my first steps into family history in 2010, a family friend asked if I would help her find the parents of her ancestor, Hannah McKenzie.

In 2023, the same family friend asked if I would like another go at finding the parents of James and Lilly. This time round, with greater experience and knowledge of records, I was able to find James' father, an army deserter who fled Ireland to escape jail time.

I discovered that Lilly's birth name was Isabella, and that she was likely orphaned before the age of three. However, I couldn't conclusively work out Lilly's parentage…maybe I'll try again in another decade's time!