I am a freelance researcher and consultant who has being doing serious genealogical research for 25 years, since 1995. My passion for history and genealogy began in early childhood. My father passed along the family interest in genealogy and history to me when I was a young boy. When I was nine years old, we were living in Austin, and my father was working on his master’s degree in history at the University of Texas.
When I was even younger, I remember my father telling us tales about my great-great grandfather’s experiences during the Civil War. In 1863, my ancestor participated in the Battle of Chickmaugua and the subsequent Battle in the Clouds. These were family oral traditions that I later researched and verified as true stories. Because of my Dad’s love for genealogy and history, we visited many important historical places when I was young, including Jamestown, Virginia; Gettysburg National Battlefield; and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. These were powerful places for me, where the living past seemed to intersect with the living present.
In high school, I did not excel in my studies, but my best and favorite subject was history, and I received the award for best student in history when I graduated from Lampasas High School in Texas. Four years later I received a B.A. in History and English from Trinity University in San Antonio, graduating cum laude. I also earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. My doctoral dissertation was an environmental ethnohistory of the Navajo Nation’s 500,000 acre ponderosa pine forest.
Since 2000, I have been living in Northern Arizona, mainly in Flagstaff, but also in Sedona and Winslow. During the past twenty years, my research endeavors have increasingly woven together genealogy or “kinship studies” with public history: the history of “ordinary” (rather than famous) people. Like a tree with a double trunk, these twin passions have gradually grown some very strong, deep roots, and long, healthy branches: a family tree. I imagine that tree as a pinon or ponderosa, of course, the two main trees of Northern Arizona’s forests and woodlands. The deserts live down below.
A major focus of my own genealogical and historical research has been the Tyree and Delilah Gentry family of South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Arkansas. These are my mother’s mixed-blood Cherokee ancestors, although I grew up knowing little or nothing of these roots. To find and re-discover this hidden part of my own family’s history, and of the history of the United States and the Cherokee Nation, I have developed some of my own distinct historical research techniques. These techniques use U.S. census and other records to look “sideways” at the closely woven fabric of American communities that existed between the Revolution and the Civil War. I have learned how to “connect the dots” while “reading between the lines.”
In the process, I have learned about what is required to do accurate, truthful, and responsible genealogical research that is ultimately based on facts and truth.
The most exciting part of this work has been the act of weaving together detailed information about a person’s or a family’s life in their own time to the broader tapestry of historical events that they lived within during their own lifetimes. I have begun to understand how my own ancestors influenced their own times, and how their own times influenced them. “We, the living” are experiencing the same kind of process today, living as we are in different, yet related times.
I am fascinated by history, and by family history in particular.
This research and consulting project is about helping you to dig deep into your own ancestors’ rich and meaningful lives, and to more fully understand how their lives are connected to your life: past, present, and future. If you have already done a fair amount of your own research, I can help you to transform a “brick wall” into a brick pathway that can lead you back into the historical and genealogical past. However, I have found that this pathway is a spiral that circles back into the present and the future. If history is merely dead, like our ancestors, then why bother?