£250 · Told & Traced
The Story
One line of your family, told the way you'd want someone to tell it.
A chart gives you names. This gives you the people. I follow one surname line as far back as the records honestly allow and then write it — the trades, the streets, the marriages, the leavings, and what was happening around them while it was happening to them.
It reads like a book because it is one. And every sentence in it can be pointed back to the document underneath, so it is a piece of writing your family can trust as well as enjoy — which is a harder thing to make than either one on its own.
What arrives
- A finished piece of twenty to twenty-four printed pages, typeset and print-ready.
- Fully sourced throughout — every claim traceable to the record it came from.
- The line set out visually as well as told, so the shape of it is readable at a glance.
- Yours to print, to hand on, and to give.
What I need from you. Which surname line you want followed, and whatever you already know about it — however little.
Ten to twelve hours of research and writing. I'll agree the timetable with you when you book.
Reserve The Story — £75 booking fee See a specimen first
£75 reserves it and starts the work. The balance of £175 is due on delivery — the finished piece is released when it is settled, and not before.
Payment is by card through Stripe. £250 is the whole price — the booking fee is simply the first part of it, nothing is added on top. Questions first? Write to me — I'd rather you asked.
What it actually looks like
Peter Hanratty signed the register in a careful, practised hand. Anne made her mark — a small, firm cross — and the priest wrote her name in around it. Forty years later their granddaughter would sign her own name to everything, and never know she was the first woman in the line who could.
From a specimen Story — the Devlin family, every name invented for illustration. Yours is written in this voice, from your records.
How the grading works
Every claim carries one of four marks — PROVED, LIKELY, FAMILY SAYS, OPEN — so you are never told a guess is a fact. It is also what makes a fixed price honest: I don't have to dig until certain about everything, because I can hand you the work and tell you exactly how certain I am about each part of it.