People often come to genealogy and history looking for certainty. They want a definitive birthplace, a clean...
Investigating the Past
DNA testing feels like a shortcut through history. You spit in a tube, and a report returns...
For most of modern genealogy, history ran in one direction: you used records to reconstruct families, and...
Genealogy sometimes feels like a negotiation between two forms of truth. On one side is cultural memory:...
Nearly every family has at least one story that functions like a miniature legend. An ancestor was...
Every family has stories. Some are polished, repeated at holidays, and treated as unquestionable truth. Others are...
Modern paperwork trains us to treat nationality as a clean category. You have a country of citizenship,...
One of the fastest ways to get stuck in genealogy is to treat modern maps as historical...
Modern life trains us to think identity is a document. A driver’s license, a passport, a social...
Forensic genealogy is often presented as a modern miracle: DNA plus records equals identity. The reality is...