About
Two brothers, and a way of working we already practise on our own family.
Heinz Bros is Phil and Greg Heinz. We build private family archives, and the sites families read them on, to archival standards — because we learned the work on our own records first and could not bring ourselves to do it any other way afterwards.
The name
Two brothers had it first, and we can date them
On 23 April 1894, Edmund Heinz of Quincy, Illinois signed a notice selling his cigar business to two of his sons — George J. and Philip A. Heinz, trading as Heinz Bros. The factory stood at 917 North Eighth Street and was part of the house they lived in; it caught fire twice. Philip was nineteen.
Those two middle initials are settled by that one notice, over their father’s own signature. A single sheet of newsprint fixes a detail that no amount of family recollection could, and there is the trade in miniature.
It also stands on the same two streets as the story on our front page. The cigar shop was 917 North Eighth. Henry Schultz’s saloon was 730 Chestnut — the corner building on that same street. In 1900 the census taker wrote the two households down nine lines apart on one sheet. Philip A. Heinz had married Henry Schultz’s youngest daughter on 10 January 1899. The first Heinz Bros and the marriage this family descends from were around one corner from each other, and we did not know it until one of us went and stood on it.
Our brother had the badge made for a hat before either of us thought of putting it on a letterhead.
The proof
You can inspect the method before you hire it
Most of what we do for clients is private and stays private. What we can show you is our own family’s archive, which we keep to the same standard we would keep yours. Counted on 26 September 2026, because a number worth giving is a number worth dating:
- Five research compilations, each with its own revision history, following lines out of Germany, Lithuania, Mexico, Texas, Kentucky and California.
- 224 people in one register, each entered once and carried across every line they belong to.
- 289 images, every one checksummed at intake, filed by where it came from rather than by who is in it, and described in a record of its own.
- 211 standing cautions — numbered notes on how this work goes wrong, kept because the mistakes are the part worth writing down.
- A private family site behind a sign-in gate, which is the same thing we would build for you.
Shown in person, with living relatives’ material withheld, to anyone seriously considering an engagement.
Standards
We work to the field’s published standards, and past them in four places
The Genealogical Proof Standard, the citation grammar of Evidence Explained, the professional code for client work, and archival practice on provenance and fixity — each one set out with what it requires and what we do about it, alongside the four things we do that no standard asks for.
Plainly
What we never claim
That we will find your ancestor. That research will be quick. Any credential we do not hold. And we name no client, show no client’s site and quote no client’s family without their specific written permission, asked for long after the work is done and easy to refuse.