The Storyline
Real families. Real discoveries. Real stories.
Two Families, One Story: The Wexford Question
In 1776—the same year the American colonies declared independence—John Kenny married Catherine Connors in New Ross, County Wexford. Eighty-two years and three more Kenny-Connors marriages later, were the families who intermarried on Prince Edward Island continuing a pattern that stretched back to Revolutionary-era Ireland?
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Two Families, One Story: Two Baptisms in Newfoundland
In autumn 1832, two Irish families—part of the same fishing community in St. John's, Newfoundland—each brought a child to be baptized. Their entries appear on consecutive pages of the same parish register. Neither family knew the significance of the other's presence. Thirty-four years later, their descendants would meet on Prince Edward Island and marry three times over.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Spools of Thread: On Holding Things Together, Imperfectly
Nine for dinner at my parents' rock maple table—both leaves extended, held in place with spools of thread. My mother's "company's coming" dishes. Her silverware. Her artificial flowers. The mechanism has been broken for years, but we make do. We hold things together imperfectly.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
Newsletter : Hidden Bonds Released in Memory of Barbara Ann O'Brien Hamall
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: the announcement of Hidden Bonds — a documentary biography series tracing the O'Brien family from Brian Boru through the Great Famine to a DNA reunion 150 years in the making. Published in memory of Barbara Ann O'Brien Hamall on what would have been her 90th birthday.
Storyline Genealogy: From Research to Story
The Silver That Came Before Us: Inherited Silver Tea Sets
Two silver tea sets sit in my home—one from my mother's house, one a gift from her when I set up my first home. As a genealogist, I examine maker's marks, research company histories, and narrow the timeline to discover which ancestors might have owned these pieces.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story.
County Clare in the Famine Years: Hidden Bonds Companion Piece
County Clare lost 42% of its farms. It had the highest eviction rate in Ireland. The Ennistymon workhouse saw nearly 5,000 deaths. This is the land Patrick and Terrence O'Brien fled in the late 1840s—the land where their family name once meant royalty, reduced to devastation. This companion piece to the Hidden Bonds documentary series explores what two teenage brothers witnessed before they embarked for America, never to see each other again.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Hidden Bonds Epilogue: The DNA Reunion
When Terrence O'Brien died in 1874, a single line in the probate document mentioned "Uncle Patrick O'Brien in Newport, Kentucky." For 150 years, that reference stood alone—no other evidence connected the New York and Kentucky families. Then DNA testing proved what documents couldn't.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Hidden Bonds Prologue: The Blood of Kings
They were descended from the High King who united Ireland. For three centuries, the Penal Laws tried to erase them. Then DNA proved what history couldn't destroy—a thousand years of royal blood connecting two Famine refugees to Brian Boru himself.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Newsletter : The Philippine Research Collection
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: an introduction to the Philippine research focus, featuring the wartime story of Mamerto Morales and Agtawagon Hill, the damaged graduation portrait, and Captain Lucas Gonzales's land-building legacy.
Storyline Genealogy: From Research to Story
The Guilbault Line: Charles Francois Guilbault
Charles François Guilbault died on June 16, 1760. Three months later, Montreal would surrender and New France would cease to exist. The priest who buried him at Sault-au-Récollet recorded a single word for his life's work: habitant. It was enough. His grandson would become a voyageur who married an Ojibwe woman—but first, there was this: a farmer who lived his entire fifty-seven years under the fleur-de-lys and died as the colony collapsed around him.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Ojibwe Baskets, Beads, and Art
When I discovered my Ojibwe 4th great-grandmother, Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe, I wasn't prepared for how profoundly that discovery would change the way I understood my family's history. For generations, she had existed only as a shadow in the records—"Sauvagesse," a generic French term meaning "Indigenous woman." No name. No story. No identity.
Then, in a marriage record from 1801, a priest had written her full Ojibwe name: Abitakijikokwe. After 200 years of silence, she emerged from the records with her Indigenous identity intact.
And so began my journey into the world of Ojibwe art—searching for tangible connections to the woman who founded my Métis family line.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies — From Research to Story
The Guilbault Line: Pierre Guilbault
Every family line has a beginning. For the Guilbaults of New France—whose descendants would include master masons, Quebec patriots, voyageurs who married into Ojibwe families, and eventually a million people living today—that beginning was Pierre Guilbault, a young man from La Rochelle who crossed the Atlantic in 1657. He failed twice to marry before wedding Fille du Roi Louise Senécal just eleven days after her arrival. They built a prosperous farm, survived a marital separation, and raised four children. But when Louise died in 1693, Pierre's attempt to remarry the same day triggered a family war so bitter that the judge used the word "aversion" to describe their mutual hatred.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
The Guilbault Line: Joseph Olivier Guilbault
He was born just five years after his parents' wedding—the first son, baptized in the parish church of Notre-Dame-de-Québec in March 1672. His father Pierre had arrived from La Rochelle fifteen years earlier; his mother Louise Senécal was a Fille du Roi who crossed the Atlantic to build a new life in New France. Joseph Olivier Guilbault would never know that ocean crossing. He was the second generation—born in the colony, rooted in the soil of Charlesbourg. He would marry twice, father eighteen children, bury too many of them, and live to see his son become an established habitant.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
The Guilbault Line: Charles Gabriel Guilbault
Before Gabriel Guilbault paddled canoes into the pays d'en haut and married an Ojibwe woman, there was his father—another Gabriel, born Charles Gabriel Guilbault in Quebec City in 1731. This Quebec patriarch married twice, raised four sons to adulthood, and established the family in L'Assomption that would eventually bridge French and Indigenous worlds. His 53-year life span encompassed the British Conquest and the transformation of New France, setting the stage for his son's frontier adventures.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
The Guilbault Line: Gabriel Guilbault pere
Gabriel Guilbault was born at L'Assomption in 1762, in the last year of New France, and lived to see the world that made him disappear. He went to the pays d'en haut as a voyageur; three of his children were born there and did not see a parish church until 1798. The Ojibwe woman he married is named in the registers of three parishes across nearly thirty years — the last of them written fourteen years after she was buried. His own record runs voyageur, farmer, mason for twenty-five years, and day labourer at the end.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Finding Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe
For generations she existed in our family tree as one word: Sauvagesse. No name, no nation, no story — just the wife of a French-Canadian voyageur, another Indigenous woman assumed lost to colonial record-keeping.
She wasn't lost. Priests had written her name down four separate times, in registers that survive. What had gone missing was the habit of looking.
This is how Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe was found — through eleven original parish registers, a full-text search that read handwriting instead of indexes, and one overlooked entry sitting directly above the marriage record everyone had already seen. That entry gave her a nation and a homeland: Saulteaux of Lake Superior, seven hundred miles west of the parish where she was buried.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: At the Lake of Two Mountains
The Guilbault Line: Gabriel Guilbault fils
Gabriel Guilbault fils was born around 1790 in the pays d'en haut—the vast interior wilderness of the fur trade—to a French-Canadian voyageur and an Algonquin woman named Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe. Conditionally baptized at age eight when his family returned to the St. Lawrence Valley, legitimated at ten when his parents formally married, Gabriel lived a life between worlds. The records show his occupation shifting from journalier to voyageur to cultivateur—still claiming the paddle at sixty years old. Father of sixteen children, owner of sixty arpents, he died in 1880 as the last of the wilderness-born.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy Documentary Biography series: Following one family line through the documents that prove it—birth to death, generation to generation.
“Voyageur et Maintenant Agriculteur”
On 10 October 1798 a priest at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie baptized three children of one family on the same day. The eldest was eight, born in the pays d'en haut, and had never been inside a parish church. In the space where a priest recorded a man's trade, this one wrote four words: voyageur et maintenant agriculteur. Voyageur, and now a farmer. The word in the middle does not mean "also" — it means the first thing has become the second. The priest wasn't describing a way of life. He was dating a change of one.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy French-Canadian Research series: Understanding the records, the context, and the lives they document.
The Guilbault Line: Evangeliste Guilbault
His father was a voyageur. He was a journalier. The primary sources tell a story that family narratives overlooked—of a man caught between eras, who died at 38 leaving three children under four and a widow who would live to ninety-one. This is not the story of a voyageur. This is the story of the last generation.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
The Hamall Line: Henry Hamall
Born around 1817 in County Monaghan, Ireland, Henry Hamall carried his family through famine and across an ocean, only to die within four years of reaching safety. This documentary biography traces his 1841 marriage to Mary McMahon, their emigration during the Great Famine, and the blended family that would eventually solve a seven-year genealogical mystery.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story