Archivists for families
An archivist for your family, not a platform.
Families are handed a box of photographs and a week to decide what to do with them. The scanning services will return the pixels. The storage services will keep the files. The consumer genealogy sites will mix your family in with strangers’ guesses. None of them will tell you who is in the picture, how anyone knows, or how sure they are.
That is the work, and it is the whole of what we do: a described family archive, built to archival standards, and a private site where your family can actually read it.
What it is for
Imagine the afternoon it lands
Imagine you send your brother a link.
He is expecting a folder of scans — the box from your mother’s closet, the one everybody agreed somebody should do something about eventually. What he finds instead is your grandmother, with a life underneath her name. Where she was born, and how that was established. The two spellings of her surname, and which one she used to sign. The year she arrived, the household she arrived into, the street she was living on when your father was born.
A document he has never seen, and beneath it, in plain language, what it says — and what it does not say.
He reads it. Then he reads the next one.
An hour later he is on the phone to the rest of the family.
That call is the thing we are actually building. Not the scans, not the storage, not the search box — the hour, and the call afterwards.
And then it keeps going
An archive your family uses, not one they visit
The site is private, and everyone you invite is in it. That is where it stops being a filing cabinet:
- An aunt remembers something and types it in under the photograph it belongs to — and it enters the archive with her name on it as the person who said so. That is a provenance record, not a comment box.
- An uncle who has never shown the slightest interest turns out to have four photographs in a drawer. He sends them in, and they are accessioned like everything else.
- Somebody corrects something. It gets checked against the record, the record wins, and everyone can see exactly why.
- A nineteen-year-old who never met any of these people reads three lives and asks a question nobody alive can answer. That is where the research starts, and it came from inside the family rather than from us.
Nobody has to learn anything to use it. If they can read a web page, they can read their own family.
What we actually do
A described archive, not a pile of scans
Scanning is the easy half, and everyone sells it. Description is the work — who is in the photograph, who says so, on what basis, and how sure they are, written down one image at a time while there is still somebody alive who can tell you.
- Every image accessioned with the container it came out of, because the envelope is evidence and it is the first thing thrown away.
- Every face identified separately, with the informant named and the strength stated. One face can be certain while the two beside it are guesses.
- Your knowledge-holders interviewed, eldest first. What they can still name has the shortest remaining life of anything in the house.
- The documents read and written up as lives — not a data sheet, but a person’s years in plain prose, with every claim in it traceable to the record it came from.
- Offsite backup and scheduled fixity checks, because a file that quietly corrupts is the failure nobody notices.
Why now rather than eventually
The reason to do this now is not that somebody died. It is that somebody has not yet.
The photographs are not the fragile part. Paper is patient, and a shoebox in a closet will outlast all of us. What is disappearing is the person who can tell you who is in them — and when that person goes, every unlabelled photograph in the house becomes permanently anonymous on the same afternoon.
That is the one appointment in this work that cannot be rescheduled, and it is why we schedule interviews before scanning rather than after.
Why there is a Heinz Bros at all
Two afternoons this whole shop rests on
We did not arrive at this work through an interest in history. We arrived at it twice, both times by accident, and everything we sell is an attempt to make sure the families we work for do not have to depend on the same luck.
- A garage in Hesperia, California, 1982. A step-grandfather was clearing out, and a box was going in the trash. Inside it were eighteen photographs and forty-five newspaper clippings out of Quincy, Illinois — a one-armed saloonkeeper standing behind his own bar at 730 Chestnut Street, a wedding portrait from January 1899, a golden wedding in 1913. Nothing was labelled. Nobody had asked for them. Had one person not been in that garage that afternoon, no living member of this family would ever have known those pictures existed — and would not have known there was anything to miss. Fourteen years later, at a reunion in Quincy, cousins who still lived there put names to the faces. Both halves of that were luck, and luck is not a preservation plan.
- A street corner in Quincy, Illinois. Revision after revision, our own compilation said the two families married across two blocks — measured saloon to saloon, down Chestnut. It was a true sentence and it was the wrong measurement. Then one of us went and stood at Eighth and Chestnut, and saw that 730 Chestnut is the corner building on North Eighth: the same street as the Heinz house at 917. The 1900 census bears it out — the two households are enumerated nine lines apart on one sheet, one census taker, one walk. Anna Schultz had been living on that street since at least September 1893. She married Philip August Heinz on 10 January 1899. They had not met across town. They had been around the corner from one another for years, and our own file went on saying otherwise until somebody walked the street.
That is the whole argument for doing this properly. A thing survives because somebody happened to be in the room on the right day — and it only becomes a story once somebody goes and stands where it happened, and lets the record be corrected by what they find there.
Once the archive exists
Three things that run on it
None of these is a starting point, and we do not sell any of them on their own. They are what an archive makes possible once it is there.
A public page for someone
When somebody in the archive dies, their page can be made public in an afternoon — because the work was already done, years earlier, properly.
Printed books
Anyone in the family can design a book from the archive and order it. Every picture in it already carries its caption, its date and its people.
Prints
Photographic prints from the masters we hold, which are the full-resolution scans rather than something downsampled for a web page.
Why you can check our work
Three things worth a minute before you hire anyone
- Every claim carries its evidence and its strength. Documented, Probable, Unproven or Eliminated — for each face in a photograph separately. See one photograph’s record in full →
- We work to the published standards of the field. The Genealogical Proof Standard, the citation grammar of Evidence Explained, and archival practice on provenance and fixity. Standards kept, and exceeded →
- Our own family’s archive is open to inspection. Five research compilations, a register of the people in them, and a register of the ways this work goes wrong. Who we are →
Tell us what you are holding
A closet of albums, a shoebox, a hard drive, a name, or a date that does not add up. Write and say which, and you will hear back from one of the brothers rather than from an intake queue.