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
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
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
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
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
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
Two Platforms, Five New Volumes
The HBCA NWC Account Books Name Index is the standard entry point for fur trade employee research. It identified Gabriel Guilbault in three account volumes. Then Ancestry found him in two more — including F.4/43, a dissolution payment list where his name appears as Gulbiau, a spelling so phonetically degraded that no surname search would ever surface it. One collection. Two platforms. Here is what each one finds, what each one misses, and the three-search protocol that now covers both.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series : A Research Journey
The Master Balance Sheet: Two Pauls, One Page
Two men named Paul Guilbault. Same company. Same years. One who paddled to Great Slave Lake at forty and came home with capital. One who left Quebec in 1821 and died in Oregon. For months they were a research problem. Then HBCA F.4/47 put them both on the same page — eight entries apart — and the North West Company's own final dissolution ledger distinguished them with a single letter. The archive had always known the difference.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut — and the Oregon Country
The Munnick Annotations:Reading Harriet Duncan Munnick
Harriet Duncan Munnick spent decades turning sparse sacramental registers into something no single archive could produce on its own — a record of who the people of French Prairie actually were, where they came from, and what happened to them. The Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest are the essential finding tool for fur trade genealogy in the Oregon Country. This post is a practical guide to reading them: how the B-, M-, S-, and A- annotation system works, how to use transcription and annotation as separate evidentiary layers, how to track a name through its phonetic variants, and where Munnick can be wrong — and why knowing that makes the resource more useful, not less.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut — and the Oregon Country
When the Research Comes Full Circle
I thought I was checking a single fact in a published case study. I ended up finding a third Guilbault voyageur, untangling two men named Paul across two generations, and arriving — by a completely different research path — in the same Oregon archive where I had been working for weeks on an entirely different family. The pays d'en haut and French Prairie turned out to be the same story, told from opposite ends.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut — and the Oregon Country
Geneviève Abitakijikokwe: Eleven Name Variants
Her name was written ten different ways across thirty-eight years of Oka Mission registers. The woman behind those names — Geneviève Abitakijikokwe, wife of the Algonquin war chief Kitchiwabisi — appears in eleven primary records between 1786 and 1824. Identifying her required going beyond the published indexes to the original manuscript. What I found there changed the entire shape of the problem.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: At the Lake of Two Mountains
Two Mothers at Oka: Identifying Catherine Messinabikwe
On April 4, 1801, a priest at the Oka mission buried a two-year-old boy named François. Two witnesses were present: the boy's ten-year-old brother, and a woman the priest recorded as Catherine mesepik8e. She was not identified as a relative. She was simply there. Tracing her Algonquian name across five colonial spellings — Mador, Mabre, Missinebi8e, mesepik8e, Messinabikwe — revealed an Ottawa woman from Michilimackinac who had buried her own daughter in the same cemetery two years earlier.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: At the Lake of Two Mountains
The Brothers Guilbault
Gabriel Guilbault's 1798 baptism record calls him "voyageur et maintenant agriculteur." His brother Paul's records never use that word — not once, in any document, across a lifetime of parish records. Yet both men worked for the North West Company at the same posts, in the same years. What two pages in a Winnipeg archive reveal about a man the Quebec parish system completely erased.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut
Finding Gabriel Guilbaut in the North West Company Records
When I searched the North West Company Account Books Name Index for "Guilb," I found Gabriel Guilbault in three separate records spanning five years—1816, 1820, and 1821. The actual documents reveal exactly what Gabriel purchased from the company store, his wages, and the moment his account was marked "Settled" when the NWC merged with the Hudson's Bay Company. A case study in fur trade genealogy.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series : A Research Journey From the Index to the Account Book
The Other Pierre Morin: Disambiguation
Two men named Pierre Morin served in the Carignan-Salières Regiment. The 1668 muster roll lists them in different companies, seven pages apart. One became a founding ancestor. The other disappeared from history. This research note documents the primary-source evidence that separates them.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
How to Prove Carignan-Salières Service With or Without a Muster Roll
None of Pierre Morin's personal documents call him a soldier. Five converging lines of evidence built the case for Carignan-Salières service — and then the 1668 muster roll confirmed what the evidence already proved. This step-by-step methodology shows how to identify a Carignan-Salières ancestor using timeline analysis, geographic origin, marriage contract witnesses, census patterns, and four independent authority sources.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Carignan-Salières — From Soldiers to Settlers
Finding an Italian Ancestor in French-Canadian Research
When you're deep in French-Canadian genealogy, the last thing you expect to find is an Italian. But a dit name—Lepiedmontois, "the Piedmontese"—revealed a soldier from Racconigi, Italy, hiding in plain sight among 10,000 French settlers. Out of the founding immigrants of New France, over 95 percent were French. Italian permanent settlers were among the rarest of the rare. This is the story of how one dit name unraveled the assumption of a purely French founding population—and what it means for your research.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: French-Canadian Genealogy — From Research to Story
Hidden Protestants: Huguenot Women Among the Filles à Marier
Among the first women who settled Quebec were hidden Protestants—Huguenots forced to convert to Catholicism to survive. Learn how to trace their buried heritage through temple registers and abjuration records.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Filles du Roi & Filles à Marier — The Women Who Built New France
When One Ancestor Appears Twice: Catherine Lemesle
How does the same woman become your 8th great-grandmother twice? Discover pedigree collapse through Catherine Lemesle, a Fille du Roi whose descendants married each other 85 years later—and what this common phenomenon means for your French-Canadian research.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Filles du Roi & Filles à Marier — The Women Who Built New France