Genealogy and Family History Writers Editing and Proofreading Services

Two men with the same name were baptised in the same parish eleven months apart. One of them is your great-great-grandfather. Everything in the book after that point — the emigration, the second family, the name on the war memorial — depends on which one you chose, and on whether you told the reader you were choosing.

We work on what family historians write — family history narratives and printed family books, biographical sketches of individual ancestors, source citations and reference apparatus, research reports and case studies for others, blog posts and society journal articles, one-name and one-place study write-ups, transcriptions and their editorial conventions, DNA findings written for relatives, and the introductions that explain what a reader is holding. Our editors work on the difference between what you found and what you concluded.

The distinction between what is proved and what is probable is the whole discipline, and it dissolves the moment a family history turns into a story. A narrative reading "in 1841 Thomas moved to Bolton with his young wife" is unfalsifiable prose covering a census entry, an assumption and a guess about a marriage. We work through these so each substantive claim is close to the source that supports it, in a form a stranger could re-find — the register, the parish, the date, the page, and where you saw it; so identity assumptions are stated where they are made, since deciding which of two Thomas Ainsworths is yours is the single most consequential act in the whole book and it is usually invisible; so conflicting evidence is presented rather than resolved silently, because the reader who inherits your research needs the conflict more than they need your conclusion; so negative findings are recorded, given that "no burial appears in the parish registers 1838–1852, which were searched in full" is a real result and saves the next person a fortnight; so family tradition is labelled as tradition and attributed to whoever told you; and so DNA findings are written with what they do and do not establish, particularly where they concern living relatives. Family histories written this way survive being checked, which is what they exist for.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including research files, unpublished findings and information about living people. We are editors rather than genealogists, and we offer no view on your identifications, sources or conclusions. What we can do is keep the difference between evidence and inference visible on the page.