The Storyline
Real families. Real discoveries. Real stories.
The Cousin Who Wasn’t
A family tree said we were cousins with Samuel Huntington, signer of the Declaration of Independence. The connection ran through a single surname—Cary—that appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. This is the story of how immigrant-origin records, a 1627 Norman parish register, and a 1919 genealogy pulled three families apart, and why a shared surname at the colonial-to-European transition is the most dangerous coincidence in genealogy.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy Methodology Series: How primary sources correct the family tree
Two Families, One Story: What the DNA Reveals
Three Kenny-Connors marriages bound two families across two continents—but were they always one family? This companion piece turns from parish records to the DNA of living descendants, confirming a shared Connors ancestry from County Wexford to Prince Edward Island and narrowing a century-old question to a single missing generation.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: DNA Analysis From Research to Story
Archdiocesan Shrine of Espiritu Santo
On Rizal Avenue in Santa Cruz, Manila stands a church that rose over a closed cemetery, was blessed by the Divine Word Fathers in 1932, and came through the Battle of Manila unscathed when much of the city around it burned. On January 22, 1958, it became part of one family's story: the church where two young physicians from the Aklan town of Numancia, Romulo G. Morales and Hally R. Tamayo, were married. More than half a century later, it was raised to the dignity of an Archdiocesan Shrine.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Sacred Places
From Aklan to America: A Doctor’s Path
Out of a town whose records had burned, the eldest son of Mamerto Morales set out to do something Numancia had rarely seen — to leave the rice fields for Manila and become a doctor. He would not walk that road alone. A doctor's daughter from the same town, Hally Tamayo, was making the same journey. Episode 3 follows two hard-won medical degrees through the universities of the capital to the 1958 wedding at Espiritu Santo Church that finally joined the Morales and Tamayo lines.
The Brother Who Also Vanished
A son disappears from his Blairgowrie family after 1861 — vanishing into one of Scotland's most common names. He surfaces again only because an 1870 marriage register paused to name his parents, the same George Robertson and Margaret Paterson from his 1841 baptism. From there unfolds the life of David Robertson's older brother James: a gamekeeper in Liverpool, two marriages, three sons with nearly identical names, and children who scattered to Toronto and New York. A Scattered Stones companion on how a common surname is the hardest kind of family history to keep honest.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
LaSalle Green Hills
The elite Catholic school on Ortigas Avenue, founded by the De La Salle Brothers in 1959 — the same year Romulo Tamayo Morales was born. For the years of his boyhood in the 1960s, before his father's medicine carried the family to Ohio, this was the daily shape of his world: green-and-white uniforms, a great domed gym that would one day count the nation's votes, and a cohort of classmates whose names would fill the country's newspapers.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Aklan to America | From Research to Story
Numancia, Aklan: A Portrait of Place
Every family history begins in a place. For the Morales and Tamayo families, that place is Numancia—a hill-less, rice-ringed town in the Western Visayas, beside the provincial capital of Kalibo. Lechon capital and pasalubong stop, home to the century-old "leafy sentinels" of Albasan and a parish at its heart, Numancia is the small town that every record in this series ultimately points back to. A portrait of the hometown the family left, and never quite left behind.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Aklan to America | From Research to Story
Petrona Quimpo: The Woman Remembered as Tonang
A family kept the mother of Mamerto Morales only as a nickname — "Tonang Quimpo" — that no register could hold. This is the story of recovering her: a girl in the Quimpo house, a widow who held her land, a grandmother named across three generations of Kalibo baptisms, and how a family's memory and a century-old register were finally made to agree.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Aklan to America | From Research to Story
St. Joseph the Worker Parish
Some churches you find on a map; this one we found in a sentence, buried in a wartime certificate. When Numancia's records burned in 1944, the sworn substitutes the family gathered all named one parish—St. Joseph the Worker—where Jose Tamayo married Corazon Roldan in 1931 and where Romulo, Hally, and Virgilio were born. This Sacred Places article tells the story of the Numancia Church and the documents that led us home to it.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Sacred Places
When the War Burned the Records
In much of the Philippines, the record you most want to see was burned in World War II. Drawing on the Morales-Tamayo case, this field guide shows how to reconstruct a lost Filipino family from what survived — church salvage books, notarial registers, delayed registrations, the immigration papers of relatives who emigrated, and DNA — and how to request the two U.S. records, the SS-5 and the A-File, that so often hold the answers.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Aklan to America | From Research to Story
From Aklan to America: Under the Stars and Stripes
When American forces landed on Panay in 1899, the Spanish world of Numancia was already passing. This second episode of From Aklan to America follows the Morales and Tamayo families through the Commonwealth years and the Japanese occupation — a notary's surviving register, a 1931 wedding at St. Joseph's, and a wartime death the records can only bracket, never quite name.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Aklan to America | From Research to Story
Cathedral of St. John the Baptist
In the coastal town of Numancia, Aklan, two families—the Morales and the Tamayo—raised their children within the spiritual orbit of the oldest church in the province. Founded as an Augustinian mission in 1581 and elevated to a parish in 1680, the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Kalibo survived Moro pirate raids, the great fire of 1885, World War II, and a 7.1 earthquake to stand today as the spiritual heart of the Ati-Atihan Festival. This Sacred Places article traces four centuries of faith and resilience—and the ancestral parish where the Morales and Tamayo families worshipped before their journey to Manila and, eventually, to America.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series : Sacred Places
From Aklan to America: Four Families, One Province
In the 1830s, on the island of Panay in the Western Visayas, four children were born who would become the founding ancestors of interconnected family lines—Gonzales, Morales, Martelino-Roldan, and Isturis. They never knew one another, yet they farmed the same fertile plains, worshipped in the same colonial churches, and lived through the same upheaval as the Philippines moved from Spanish colony to revolutionary republic. A century later, their descendants would converge in a single family. This first episode traces those four lines through parish registers and property records, set against the encomienda system, the 19 Martyrs of Aklan, and the fall of Spanish Kalibo in 1898.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Aklan to America | From Research to Story
Église Saint-Aubin de Tourouvre
The eight-century Perche church that baptized Jean Creste in 1626 — and thirty-five other founding pioneers of New France whose names are recorded on a plaque inside: Juchereau, Pinguet, Guyon, Roussin, Gagnon, Giguère, Mercier, Rivard, Pelletier, Provost, and more. The Romanesque south wall dates to the twelfth century; the bell tower with its lantern campanile is Renaissance; the great baroque high altar is dated 1646; the famous Mercier emigration stained glass was installed in 1893. The building survived the burning of Tourouvre by retreating German troops on 13 August 1944, almost untouched.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series : Sacred Places
Marie Crête: The Daughter Who Carried the Line
Notre-Dame de Québec, October 1657: a four-day-old infant carried to the font and baptized by the Sulpician Vicar Apostolic of New France. Sixty-five years later she would be buried in the same parish, a widow of three husbands. Between those two acts Marie Crête bore twelve children, sued her own brother-in-law in the Provost's Court of Quebec for twelve hundred livres, partitioned an urban Quebec property near the Hôtel-Dieu with the seigneur Saint-Simon, and paid seigneurial dues to the Crown's farmer-general. A documentary biography of the 8th great-grandmother of the Guilbault line — three marriages reconstructed from parish, notarial, judicial, and seigneurial records.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Québec
In a modest 1647 stone church on the rock of Quebec, the marriage of a Norman bride and a Percheron husband was recorded on 13 September 1654. Over the next seventeen years she would return to the same parish church ten times to baptize her children at its font. Once, in the spring of 1663, to bury a six-week-old daughter. The cathedral-basilica that stands on the site today is the third major building since hers — destroyed in 1759 by British shelling, again in 1922 by fire, rebuilt stone-by-stone each time from photographs and the original Baillairgé plans.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series : Sacred Places
The Mathematics of French-Canadian Cousinhood
When my son told me his coworker had French-Canadian background, I predicted we were probably 9th-to-10th cousins before either of us checked anything. I have made that prediction many times across my career, and the math always works. An essay on pedigree collapse and the founder effect.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
Église Saint-Martin de Vieux-Bellême
In a Norman priory church older than France itself, four children of Vincent Gaulin and Marie Bonnemer were baptized between 1620 and 1630. Two would later cross to New France.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series : Sacred Places
Marguerite Gaulin: A Fille à Marier of the Perche
Marguerite Gaulin was baptized on 14 May 1627 in the parish of Saint-Martin-du-Vieux-Bellême, in the rolling country of the Perche west of Paris. Twenty-seven years later she crossed an ocean as a fille à marier, married Jean Crête in the manor house of Sieur Robert Giffard at Beauport, and spent the next forty-nine years raising ten children at the heart of the Giffard-Juchereau seigneurial circle. This documentary biography traces her life through twelve primary sources, three royal censuses, and the baptism register acts of every child she bore.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Filles du Roi & Filles à Marier — The Women Who Built New France
The 1926 Irish Census: A Genealogist's Guide
For one hundred years, the first census of the Irish Free State sat sealed in archival boxes. On 18 April 2026, the National Archives of Ireland released the entire collection to the public — nearly three million individuals, restored to the documentary record on the same calendar date their forms were filled in. This is a practical guide for genealogists working the new resource: what the census contains, how to search it effectively, the known data limitations and forthcoming improvements, and the citation conventions to use when sharing what you find.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy Series: A Storyline Genealogy Research Guide