The Storyline
Real families. Real discoveries. Real stories.
Newsletter: Autumn 2026
As Storyline Genealogy completes its first year, a reflection on moving From Research to Story, and a tour of what has grown since spring: three new hubs on Women & Legal Agency in New France, Research Methodology, and French Prairie; a new Voyageur Register; the recovery of Petrona "Tonang" Quimpo; and our first case studies from Scotland.
Storyline Genealogy: From Research to Story
One Wedding, Two Lisettes
On a single winter day in 1839, two men named Joseph each married a woman named Lisette at the Willamette mission. The family trees made them one couple and gave a Shuswap woman a Chinook chief's ancestry. The register never merged them.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Research Methodology
The Husband’s Permission
Every other woman in this collection is a widow — not by choice, but because a married woman could not bind herself under the Coutume de Paris, and so left far fewer records. The incapacity was never absolute. Marie Riton contracted at Beauport in 1666, authorized inside the act by the husband standing beside her. Marie Duteau contracted at Cap-de-la-Madeleine in 1668 under a power of attorney, her husband absent, and bound herself alone. Neither could write her own name.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Filles du Roi & Filles à Marier — The Women Who Built New France
Two Families, One Story: The Kenny Women of Chicago
Margaret Connors Kenny came to Chicago a widow with four small children. This episode follows what the women of that family built over the next ninety years — Catherine Kenny Flynn, who kept a house for her mother for twenty-five years while raising ten children of her own, and Ellen Xavier O'Connor, who married her sister's widower in 1902 and raised her sister's children as her own.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Two Families, One Story: The Researcher
She compiled the family group sheet that opens the Connors line on 4 November 1991, ten weeks before her husband died. Nine years later six cousins took a house on Peaks Island and drove on to Prince Edward Island together. One by one, everyone at that table has left us. This is what they left behind.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Two Families, One Story: Margaret Katherine Kenny
The youngest of Thomas P. Kenny's seven children, and the bridge between two documentary biography series. Her family papers recorded her birth year as 1908 twice, in two documents written by the same hand. The parish register had it right in 1908 and still had it right sixty years later, when she wrote and asked.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
The Card Said La Rochelle
Every genealogist knows to go to the original. That is only half a rule, because it does not say what to do when the sources you have reached disagree with each other. Four worked examples from the file of one woman, and the four tests they yield.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Research Methodology
Louis Couillaud dit Larocquebrune
Two fires destroyed the Contrecoeur registers, so no record of his birth survives and genealogists still disagree over the year. His father died in debt inside that gap. His mother was sued, could not pay, and watched the crop seized. Six days after his uncle sold the land he was living on, a Montreal notary wrote down what Louis Couillaud owned: nothing. He was hired out for a year — eighty livres, his food, his laundry, and one pair of beef-hide shoes. Two years later the family concession was auctioned to his brother. By 1718 the parish registers call him a miller. By 1724 a seigneurial enumeration puts him first among the habitants on the south coast of Île Perrot, with a house, a barn, a stable and twenty arpents under the plough.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
Pierre Morin & Catherine Lemesle
On 18 November 1706 a man of fifty-six was carried into the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec. Thirteen days later his wife was admitted too. Neither of them could write their name — and almost everything we know of Pierre Morin and Catherine Lemesle was written down by other people.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
Professional Life
Over four decades, Thomas Kenny Hamall's working life touched cancer research and preventive medicine, riot-torn cities and corporate boardrooms, a farmhouse in Ohio and a chamber of commerce in Atlanta, international trade missions and public television. Episode Six of The Hamall Line reconstructs that career — from a young man showing cancer-education films in 1955 Miami to the founding father of Atlanta's public broadcasting collaborative — pieced together from the certificates, letters, press clippings, and objects he kept. A thread runs through all of it: wherever he went, he built the connections between institutions and the communities they served.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
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