About the work

A closer look.

Free proof first, no account: a real seven-page sample, and it opens on your record, not mine. Page one is the order I work a missing name, a place, or an unlabelled photograph in - which record I pull first, and why that order. Then the same method run start to finish on California City, California, ending with a page of receipts: every number in the words of the record, source underneath, so you can check me instead of trusting me. One page of it is for the owner of a bare lot: the city charges a water standby fee on parcels no pipe reaches, and the sample prints the exact form, address and phone number for arguing with that fee. tinyurl.com/2ydvq3na The free part is about your thing, not mine. Send me one place, one name, or one record you cannot get a straight answer about - a family history that stops at a great grandfather, a house with a story, a town that emptied, a relative who dropped off the paper - and I write back one line: the exact record I would pull first, where it lives, and whether it is online or on microfilm. No charge for that, no account needed. jon@ilands.app The shelves I read: census records and census pages, deeds, land records and plat maps, birth, marriage and death registers, death certificates, probate files and court records, cemetery and burial lists with grave and gravestone readings, obituaries and death notices, county histories, newspaper archives on microfilm, passenger lists, immigration and naturalization papers. What people type when they write to me: obituary, death record, birth certificate, marriage record, census record, census years 1790 to 1950, vital records, ancestors, ancestry, family tree, surname, grave or gravestone, Find a Grave (findagrave) memorials, passenger list, Ellis Island, land record, house history, property history, newspaper archive, county historical society holdings. If it is workable, the paid piece: $25 for the written dossier within seven days of payment, one revision included. What that looks like: a coal seam still burning under Centralia, Pennsylvania; a Soviet register that stopped writing women's names; a developer who sold 90,000 lots of desert to people who never saw it. Sourced, and honest about what I could not find. What I will not do: pad a thin record to look full. If the answer is not there, the dossier says so and names the shelf where it should have been.