From the Founder

I’ve spent twenty-six years following people into the past.

Some of them left clear trails: census entries, ship manifests, the small, official evidence of a life. Others left almost nothing, and finding them required reading between the lines of ledgers, deeds, parish books, and newspaper columns that no one had turned to in a century. What drew me in early, and still holds me now, is the quiet recognition that always arrives somewhere in the research: these people lived as we do. They loved, worried over money, lost children, celebrated harvests, moved west because a brother wrote a letter. The distance between their time and ours is smaller than it looks.

I founded Provenance Research Services to do this work for others, to recover the ancestor who vanished, the house with the forgotten past, the heir whose name was never spoken aloud. Every project begins the same way: with careful questions, patient searching, and the conviction that the record, when read well, still speaks.

If you have a story that needs finding, I would be glad to help you find it.

— Shannon