I came across this short biographical sketch this morning, the subject of which I now want to read a whole novel about—if anyone would like to volunteer writing it.

It was the third day of a losing battle, and this was to be one last desperate attempt to snatch victory. The charge that followed has been ruthlessly romanticized—the so-called High Water Mark of the Confederacy—but in reality it was just death, death, and more death.

Yesterday, as part of a campaign to advertise its annual conference, the genealogy site FamilySearch sent an email informing me that my father and Elvis Presley were sixth cousins. I mean, that’s good marketing, right? Only if you take your genealogy on faith.

2022 was the first full year of Black Sheep Genealogy. I made it! Now I’m trying to remember what I spent the whole year doing.

Secrets are everywhere in families. Of course they are. Even events that appear on the front page of the local newspaper can be locked away and forgotten over time.

Imagine your brother went off to war and never returned. You would assume he had died, right? But what if … he just never returned?

I traveled all the way to Upson County, Georgia, a few weeks ago to do research for a client.

It’s not enough to say that a relative died, or even when, where, and how. In our reports, we try to put you there whenever possible.

We’ve just completed our first pro-bono family-history report, as part of an initiative we announced back in March. But how are we going to get through all 130 or so applications? I’ve got a plan.

While many of us are determined to connect with our past, we are not always comfortable with the ugliness that can also come with family history: criminal deeds, for instance, or the enslavement of men, women, and children.

Because they can’t afford to hire a genealogist or subscribe to a research site, some people don’t have access to their own family history. That’s not right and I want to change it.

This can happen to family historians: something worth investigating is so obvious, so right in front of our noses, we don’t even notice it. For instance, the houses our subjects lived in.

“A plus-sized Jewish lady redneck died in El Paso on Saturday.” So begins the latest obituary to go viral. Nothing in my family quite rivals that, but this one, which reads more like an adventure novel than anything else.

Every genealogist and family historian has a story—how their interest was pricked, how a quest for records, relationships, and stories began. Here’s mine.

Here’s something about family history: you encounter a lot of men. While women are often obscured in the records, they still played significant roles in their families. When researching, that can be too easy to forget.

I hear this from clients a lot: “I don’t know where to start.” Even thinking about your family’s history can seem a little overwhelming. So many generations, all those different branches. But here’s a simple answer.

Just last year we helped you connect with an ancestor who mined copper in West Cork before finding a home on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We uncovered stories from the American Revolution and the Civil War.

Here’s one aspect of genealogy I don’t see acknowledged very often: its preoccupation with death. Sometimes it took a remarkable death to show up in the historical record.

One of the prized documents in my own extended family is a letter from John Wolfe, in Missouri, to his brother Pat back home in Ireland. It tells a compelling story, if you can manage to read it, that is.

Doing research for a client, I encountered something strange. In every new census, the husband and wife I was following seemed to have a new set of children? How? The answer is as obvious as it is devastating.