Services

The archive is the work. The rest runs on it.

We sell one thing: a described family archive, and the private site your family reads it on. Everything else on this page — public pages, books, prints, research — is something an archive makes possible once it exists. None of them is a starting point, and we do not sell any of them on their own.

Every engagement is scoped in writing, and agreed with you, before any work begins. The standards all of it is held to are set out in full.

The work

Building the archive

For the generation now holding a parent’s photographs, who can see that the identifications are dying with the eldest relatives. Scanning is the easy half. Description is the work, and it is the half nobody sells.

How it goes

Intake. We inventory the containers before anything is opened out — the envelope, the album, the estate it came from — because the container is evidence and it is discarded first.
Interviews, first. Your knowledge-holders, eldest first, before a single thing is scanned. What they can still name is the asset with the shortest remaining life, and everything else in the schedule bends around it.
Accession. Every image scanned or ingested, checksummed, and filed by where it came from. Two prints of one photograph are two records; two versos in two hands are two witnesses.
Description. Who is in it, identified by whom, on what basis, at what strength. Date with its basis stated. Place as written, kept apart from place as inferred.
The lives. The documents read and written up as prose a relative will actually read — each one built from the records underneath it, and never from a summary of them.
Stewardship. Offsite backup and scheduled fixity checks, because a file that quietly corrupts is the failure nobody notices until it is too late to fix.

The exit is guaranteed in writing. At any time, for any reason, you receive the complete store and all its metadata in open formats. Nothing we build is a hostage.

Where it all comes together

The family site

The archive is the thing we build. The site is the thing your family experiences — and it is the reason any of this is worth doing rather than an extra we bolt on at the end.

It is private. Only the people you invite can open it, you control the invitations, and living relatives are absent by default rather than redacted. Inside it:

Every person has a page — the facts on one tab, their life written out on the other, with the documents and photographs that support each of them.
Browsed by person and by decade, not by folder. Nobody has to know how it is filed, because the filing is ours and the views are generated.
Relatives can write back. A memory typed under a photograph is recorded as testimony with their name on it — an informant, dated, exactly like any other source we take.
Relatives can send things in. The four photographs in somebody’s drawer get accessioned, checksummed and described like everything else, and the person who sent them is recorded as where they came from.
Comments and questions, moderated by you, sitting beside the thing they are about.
It tells each visitor how they fit — their own line through the tree, rather than a wall of strangers with the same surname.

This is the part that cannot be bought anywhere else. A scanning service returns files to one person. A storage service keeps them for one person. A family is not one person, and an archive that only its commissioner ever opens has failed at the only thing it was for.

Once the archive exists

What runs on it

Each of these needs a described archive underneath it. That is not a sales rule, it is a practical one: none of them can be done properly without the work already being done.

A public page for someone who has died

When somebody already in the archive dies, their page can be made public — the life already written, the photographs already identified, the documents already there. It takes an afternoon, because the work was done years earlier and done properly.

We do not build memorial sites for families who come to us at the time of a death. It cannot be done to this standard in a week, and we would rather say so than sell a hurried version of the one thing we are careful about.

Books

Anyone in the family can lay out a book from the archive and order it — a person, a branch, a decade, or the whole thing. Every image in it already carries its caption, its date and its people, so the book is composed out of described material rather than out of a folder of untitled scans.

Prints

Photographic prints taken from the masters we hold — the full-resolution scans, not the downsampled copies a web page uses. Where a photograph survives in two prints, we know which is the better one to print from, because that was recorded at accession.

When only the records will answer

Research

An archive raises questions: a face nobody can place, a date that does not work, a name that changes spelling between two documents, an ancestor who simply stops appearing. Research is how those get answered, and the answers come back into the archive as described records rather than as a report that sits in a drawer.

What you receive

A written scope first — the questions, the record classes to be searched, and what “finished” will mean.
A sourced compilation: every conclusion carrying both its strength and what was actually examined, with eliminated candidates recorded so nobody rediscovers them as news.
A narrative written for your relatives rather than for researchers — the version people will actually read.
Negative results, written up as findings. An exhausted search is a result, and it is delivered as one.

Where we are strongest

German parish and civil registers; United States federal census and vital records; Mexican parish and civil registers along the Texas border; Kentucky records; and the dating and identification of photographs as a piece of work in its own right. We claim a specialty only where the portfolio can prove it.

The address

Where the site lives, and whose name is on it

Your family site needs an address. There are two ways to have one, they cost the same, and the choice is not permanent.

Your own domain. Something like thesmithfamily.org, registered in your name, not ours — if you already own one we will use it. We handle the DNS, the certificate and the sign-in gate; you hold the registration, which is the part that matters, because it means the address is yours to take elsewhere. Reckon on ten to twenty dollars a year paid to the registrar, not to us.
A subdomain of ours. Something like smith.heinzbros.com — nothing to buy, nothing to renew, and live the same day the site is. Our own family’s archive runs this way, at family.heinzbros.com, which is how we know the arrangement holds.

You can start on a subdomain of ours and move to your own later. When you do, we redirect the old address to the new one and keep it redirecting — because the thing that actually breaks in a move is the link you already emailed to eighty relatives, and nobody sends that twice.

Neither option is a lock-in. The written exit is the same either way: the complete store and all its metadata, in open formats, whenever you ask. A subdomain of ours is an address we lend you, not a hold we have over you.

Not sure where to start?

Say what you are holding and we will tell you — including when the answer is that you do not need us yet. That conversation costs nothing.

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