The Storyline
Real families. Real discoveries. Real stories.
Three Generations of Shrinking and Expanding
Kate Hamall bore six children in Chicago and buried four of them across 1892 and 1893. Two generations later her great-grandson Thomas Kenny was the only person alive carrying that line forward — one boy of six, in a household that had just come apart. His cousins Edward and Emmett Holland both lived to eighty-nine and had no children, so that branch ended quietly in the 1990s with nobody left to tell. Then in 1957 Thomas Kenny married Barbara Ann O'Brien, and they had six children: the number Kate started with, eighty years on.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy Series: From Research to Story
Mothers and Sons: A Working-Class Family Pattern
Kate kept house with Thomas Henry from 1911 until she died in 1919. Emma was with Thomas Eugene, on and off, for the best part of twenty years. Margaret joined Thomas Kenny's household for the last stretch of her life. Read through a modern lens the repetition looks like a family trait; read through the household accounts it looks like arithmetic — no pensions, no Social Security until 1935, and women earning half a man's wage for the same work. Margaret is the proof of it: she followed the family north, took an apartment of her own in New Jersey, and was still keeping books at sixty. She moved in only when she could no longer pay for a front door of her own.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy Case Studies Series: From Research to Story
Four Words That Solved a Mystery
After seven years of failed research attempts with dozens of John Kennys in Brooklyn records, a single city directory entry changed everything. Discover how 'Kenny, Elizabeth, wid. Richard' unlocked an impossible genealogical puzzle and revealed an innovative research methodology.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: When traditional research methods fail, innovative approaches unlock the impossible cases that define professional genealogy.
The Stone Cutter Who Vanished in Georgia
A Brooklyn stone mason vanished in Georgia in 1910, sparking a cross-state search by his devoted son. This cold case illustrates how modern DNA analysis, digital archives, and professional genealogy techniques could solve family mysteries that stumped investigators over a century ago.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: When professional research tackles the cold cases that have haunted families for generations.
Hidden in Plain Sight: Philippine Research Barriers
Have you ever hit a brick wall researching your Filipino heritage? For years, the Tamayo family of Aklan was a classic dead end—a marriage, an immigration trail to the United States, and almost nothing else. Then, in 2024, FamilySearch launched Full Text Search, a tool that reads the actual text inside digitized documents rather than just indexed names. A single query—"Tamayo" + "Aklan, Philippines"—surfaced a multi-generational paper trail that had been invisible for decades: a patriarch's 1936 residence certificate, the 1938 deeds that settled his estate and named his widow and children, and the property his son and daughter-in-law accumulated into the 1960s. This is how modern technology is making "impossible" Philippine genealogy possible.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Aklan to America | From Research to Story