This week’s prompt asks me to choose an ancestor and write about how he or she made a living.
I am going to write about my own.
Because somewhere along the way, I realized something that took me decades to see clearly: I have been doing the same job my entire career. I just kept changing what I called it.
Two careers. One craft. This is what life as a lifelong genealogist has actually looked like for me, even when my job title said something else.
The Recognition
The moment came at my desk a few years ago. I was deep in a corporate research project, tracing an entity through three name changes, two mergers, and a jurisdictional move from Delaware to Nevada. I needed to figure out which modern company was the legal successor to a defunct subsidiary so we could release a forty-year-old lien.
I had a stack of certificates of merger, a spreadsheet of name changes, and old corporate filings in front of me. I was building a chain of evidence to prove descent.
And I thought, this is exactly what I do on weekends.
The work I had been paid to do for thirty years and the work I had been doing for love even longer were not two different things. They were the same craft, applied to different families.
Thirteen Years of Probate Work
I spent the first thirteen years of my paralegal career in estates, trusts, and probate. The work, stripped of its legal language, was genealogy.
When a client died without a surviving spouse or children, my job was to determine the legal next of kin. That meant building a family tree for the decedent. Locating siblings. Finding the children of deceased siblings. Confirming who had survived whom and in what order. Making sure every legitimate heir received proper notice of the probate.
The vocabulary was different. Decedents instead of ancestors. Issue instead of descendants. Per stirpes and per capita instead of generation charts. But the underlying work was the same. I proved family relationships from documents.
I learned the same lesson genealogists learn: family informants are not always reliable narrators.
I worked on more than one case where the family member providing information about the decedent’s relatives was mistaken, forgetful, or actively misleading. In one matter, we received assurances that the decedent had no living relatives at all. Six months into the probate, a half-sister appeared. She was real. She had documentation. She had been left out of the story we had been told.
It did not matter why the information was wrong. What mattered was that the record told the truth that the witness had not.
The documentary record is the real witness.
That was thirteen years of training in evidence evaluation. I just was not calling it that.
Ten Years of Corporate Histories
I have spent the last decade doing corporate paralegal work, managing legal entities and subsidiaries. It is another version of the work a lifelong genealogist does, even though no one calls it that. The longer I do it, the more obvious the parallel becomes.
Companies have lineages. They are born through incorporation and they end through dissolution. They merge. They change names. They move across jurisdictions. They are absorbed into larger entities or spun off to begin new lines.
A meaningful part of my job is tracing those lineages.
We receive requests to release claims or liens recorded in the names of entities we owned years ago. Before anything can be released, I have to identify the corporate descendant. Which modern entity holds the rights and obligations of that long-defunct subsidiary?
The answer is rarely obvious. It requires tracing the entity through name changes, mergers, and reorganizations until I can prove that today’s Entity X is the legal successor to yesterday’s Entity Y.
I assemble the chain. I document every step. I support each conclusion with records.
They are pedigree charts in business attire.
The Blog Years
When I started this blog and began researching my own family seriously, I expected the work to feel different from my day job. It does not.
What feels different is the stakes.
The families I traced in probate were strangers. The entities I trace at work are commercial fictions. The family I am tracing now is mine. Anastasia Hlinka. Anna Hurkala Marcisak. Eva Marcisak Dubinsky. Mary Plunkett Dowling. Julia Elizabeth Dowling Sten.
These are not case files.
The methodology is identical. The difference is that this time, the conclusion matters to me. The work of a lifelong genealogist and the work of a paid researcher turn out to use the same toolkit.
I evaluate sources for reliability. I distinguish original records from derivative ones. I weigh conflicting evidence. I build proof arguments. I cite under Evidence Explained the way I cite under the Bluebook at work. When a family informant tells me something that the documentary record contradicts, I follow the record. When a record looks wrong, I look for corroboration before I accept it.
The Genealogical Proof Standard is a standard of proof. Reasonably exhaustive research. Complete and accurate citations. Skilled analysis. Resolution of conflicts. A soundly reasoned conclusion.
I did not have to learn that framework when I started taking my genealogy seriously. I had been working inside it for decades.
What This Means for How I Work
The same instincts that shaped me as a lifelong genealogist run through the research I do for my own family.
When I look at my Clifford Max research, where I am working through DNA evidence to identify the man who fathered him, I am building a case. Multiple lines of evidence. Documentary corroboration. Elimination of alternatives. A reasoned conclusion supported by the record.
When I look at my Ellen McAuliffe research, where my Australian DNA cousin and I are working to prove her parentage, I am running a collaborative investigation. Separate records. Shared analysis. Joint conclusions.
When I look at my Sven Svensson brick wall, where my great-grandfather claimed not to know his own grandfather, I am working against a flawed witness. His statement does not align with the parish records. The records carry more weight. My job is to determine what actually happened.
This is how I have always made a living: by proving how one thing becomes another.
The Twelve-Year-Old
I have been doing this since I was about twelve years old.
I remember the doing of it. Asking relatives questions they had not been asked in decades. Drawing rough family trees. Writing names down. Filing things in folders that were too organized for a twelve-year-old. Picking it up more seriously in my early twenties. Never really putting it down.
By the time I sat for my first paralegal job at twenty-seven, I had already been a researcher for more than a decade. I just had not been getting paid for it.
I have been a genealogist since I was twelve. The job titles just took a while to catch up.
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