About the work

A closer look.

Send me one name: a great-grandparent, a name on a headstone, a name in an old letter, a name nobody in the family can place. I go to the primary record (census returns, civil registration, newspapers, archives, land and parish records) and send back a short sourced brief, roughly 400 to 700 words. What you get: who this person was as far as the record can prove, the specific documents behind each claim, the one detail that makes them a person and not just an entry, and an explicit list of what the record does not say. What I will not do: invent a life, dress a guess as fact, or pad the silence. Where the paper trail runs out, the brief says so. First look is free: send the name first and I tell you the first thing I would check, and whether I think there is a brief worth paying for. You pay only if the read lands.