Family history, verified
Your family's story, told from the records — and honest about what the records cannot prove.
Told & Traced builds family histories from original sources — census returns, civil registers, parish books, street directories — and writes them up so your family can actually read them. Every claim carries a grade, and where the record runs out, I say so. An honest gap is worth more than a comfortable guess, because you can do something with a gap.
See the four ways in The full menu (PDF)
The offer
Four ways in, from one name to the whole family
Start wherever you like. Every rung is a finished object in its own right — nothing is a teaser for the next thing, and nothing arrives half-done.
The First Trace
One ancestor in. The whole household they lived in comes back, graded and sourced, inside 72 hours.
Four Generations Back
Your direct line back to your great-great-grandparents, on one framable sheet, with the six-page report that proves it.
The Story
A single surname line traced as far back as the records honestly allow, and written as a piece of proper writing.
The Book
Two recorded conversations, both parental lines traced, and the whole of it made into one volume with the audio kept.
Prefer it all on one page? Download the menu as a PDF — what each one is, what it costs, and exactly what arrives.
Before you buy anything
See exactly what arrives
These are the real deliverables, built on a specimen family whose names are invented for illustration. Nothing here is a mock-up of something that doesn't exist yet — download them, read every page, and decide afterwards.
The First Trace · £20
One page: a whole household on the night it was recorded, graded and sourced, with three named next records.
Four Generations Back · £145
The framable chart of thirty-one ancestors, plus the six-page report that proves every link on it.
The whole menu
All four options on one page — what each is, what it costs, and precisely what is handed over at the end.
The method
The four marks
Everything made here grades every claim about your family. This is the whole method, on one line each — and it is the reason a fixed price can be an honest price.
A document says so. Cited, and read by a person — not inferred by software.
The record points one way, but the document that would settle it has not been found.
Remembered, or in the tree, but not written down anywhere yet. Recorded as testimony, never repeated as fact.
No evidence either way, and I say so. This is the mark most researchers quietly leave out.
The small print, in plain sight
Before any money changes hands
The full Terms and Conditions — your 14-day right to cancel, what happens if the person whose story it is changes their mind, and who owns what when the work is done — are published here, not sent after you have paid. The privacy notice and the policies on difficult findings and on how AI is and isn't used are alongside them.
Who this is
Told & Traced is John Britton — a Belfast genealogist with over a decade of research behind the method: Irish, British and Italian record sets, brick walls broken and honestly declared unbroken, and a family archive of his own that taught him what surviving records can and cannot carry.
Find Told & Traced at @toldandtraced.