The Cousins

About Peter

Peter was born in Ilford, Essex, near London. He has a PhD from Cornell University and many years experience in historical research. A retired university lecturer in theatre history and with an interest in archaeology, Peter is resident near the ancient walled town of Chester, England, and is well placed to make on-the-spot enquiries in the British Isles.

“The thing I like about genealogical research” he says,”apart from the contact it gives us with our own individual ancestors, is the glimpse it often provides of the broader historical setting. We are drawn to learn more about the great moments in our nations’ histories when we realise that our own flesh and blood were living through them.”

About Karen

Karen was bitten by the genealogy bug at a young age. In fact, she still has her initial research from when she was 12, including the letters she wrote to her grandparents asking for information (how precious are those letters now that her grandparents are gone). Her interest in family history has never abated, and she has researched both her own and her husband’s family trees. Everyone on both sides of the family seems quite happy to have her as the family historian, and she has become the caretaker of many interesting documents and photos because of that!

Her first career is that of a technical writer. She does freelance work for telecommunications and software companies, working mostly from home. Along with the research and organizational skills she acquired in university, the work of a technical writer has taught her to be careful, quick, and accurate. She is also able to pay close attention to detail, and to realize when she may be making a link that doesn’t have any evidence to support it. Concise summaries of information are also her forte.

She truly feels like a detective every time she sits down to try to find someone or a link to someone in a family tree. It is a thrill to her when she finds even a little bit of evidence! Now that her own family tree has been fairly thoroughly researched, she offers her skill and enthusiasm as a researcher and documenter of family history to others.

When not tied to the computer, her main occupation is running a busy household with a husband, three preteen daughters, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, two rabbits, and three dwarf hamsters. For sanity of mind, she rides horses a couple of times a week.

About Sandra

Often touted as a “Jane of All Trades,” Sandra was encouraged at young age to follow her multiple passions of art, music, writing, and jurisprudence. But after a somewhat sketchy tour of duty in law school, she eventually threw out her original childhood aspirations of becoming the next singing, dancing lawyer.

Sandra also shelved the desire to be the next Jane Austin when she met and fell in love with computer programming and graphic design. Such an odd couple. With a firm understanding of HTML, Javascript and CSS, she started to tackle the “real world” of website design and development. In 1994 she delved into the young, tender underbelly of what would become the Internet and launched her first web-based business, WunderWebs. She hasn’t looked back since.

Sandra came to genealogy from an interest in researching her own family tree and she has been a dedicated family historian for over 10 years now. It was her own family research that led directly to meeting her cousins, Peter and Karen. Her love of genealogy comes from wanting to know not only the history of her ancestors but the stories of their lives as well. It goes beyond just documenting facts; for her it goes to pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish. Sandra firmly believes good genealogy research is part skill and knowledge, but it is also about instinct — an inborn sense that some small tidbit of vague information is a key piece of the puzzle.

It is hard to calculate but Sandra estimates that over the years she has investigated more than 1000 family trees. The number of individuals is much much more difficult to guess at. Her specific areas of expertise are ship manifests and photo identification. Whether you require a people search or ancestry researched, there is little she has not encountered before.