We’re excited to announce a new theme for our blog: “How I Solved It“. Each week we’ll share curated guest posts from bloggers from around the web that we’ve handpicked just to share with you as well as stories from our own personal genealogy adventures.

These blog posts will highlight sound research methodology and techniques as well as interesting real-life genealogy stories showing how brick walls, photo mysteries, immigration trails, and other genealogy mysteries were solved.

If you have a post you’d like us to share, please let us know in the comments!

Introducing Your Curators and Writers…The RootsFinder Marketing Team!

Heather Henderson

Heather Henderson, RootsFinder

I was captivated by a letter written by my great grandfather to his daughter upon the death of his wife. I needed to know more, and my curiosity hasn’t stopped. I started helping other people research their ancestry as well. After my job with the 2002 Olympic Winter Games ended, I decided to become a full-time professional genealogist and the rest, as they say, is history.

In addition to genealogy, I’m a huge fan of the earth and traveling. I’m also passionate about start-up businesses, especially in software and/or sustainability so sometimes I put on my operations manager and/or designer/marketing hat and take on big, hairy, audacious goals. Sometimes I even succeed.

Erin Harris 

I started my genealogy journey while I was still in college around 2002. It started as a simple curiosity after I moved back to the city where my family was originally from when they immigrated to the United States (Dayton, Ohio) from Germany. Shortly after moving there, I realized that I had a lot of family history and my last name wasn’t as uncommon there was it was where I grew up and attended school. Knowing I have family history in this area sparked my interest and got me to where I am today with my genealogy knowledge and research skills.

When I’m not working on my family history, I am a freelance marketing professional where I help local businesses with website development, SEO and other marketing projects. I’m also the social media manager and US Blogger for Famicity.com and marketing manager for RootsFinder.com.

Annie Leishman Merrell

Hi, I’m Annie Merrell, a professional genealogist and avid family historian. I love hunting down stories about breaking brick walls and preserving our past. Each day, I search for genealogically relevant posts that focus on solving different research problems. It is rewarding to see how many different techniques, technologies, and tools are used to find our families. I love seeing the common thread of how finding family and celebrating heritage helps understand the present”

Clorinda Madsen

My name is Clorinda Madsen; I graduated from BYU way back in the 90s with a degree in Family History. I worked for various companies including Ancestry until I moved away from Utah for a few years. I’ve done some private research for clients over the years. I’ve been reading genealogy blogs and follow some on Facebook to keep up with the family history world.

Working for RootsFinder, I have been expanding on the blogs, Facebook groups, pages and Twitter accounts I follow to find even more quality posts about successes researchers have had in figuring things out, their tips and tricks, etc. The community is linked together and one blog post will often send me to another blog to follow and more stories of successes. I’m happy to see so many researchers, both professional and amateur, who take their research seriously and who like to share how they do it.

Heather

Heather

Heather is part of the RootsFinder team. Her love of family history has taken her to some pretty interesting places with many adventures since about 1991, as a professional since 2000. She's also passionate about the earth, startup businesses, and the triple bottom line. Pretty pictures & occasional fun at https://www.instagram.com/heatherdevaun/
Heather