I’m a family historian and graphic designer, part detective, and not a trained historian, though I’d like to be one when I grow up.
I’ve been researching my family for nearly twenty years. Most of the work here began in 2020, when my grandmother’s papers came to me from my mother. That year I wrote biographies of my grandparents Georg and Charlotte, and what started as a pandemic project got (somewhat embarrassingly) out of hand. Along the way it became an accidental apprenticeship: family history as the laboratory, my family as the subject, and the documents as the teachers.
I do this for my children. These are their people, and I want the stories held onto for them.
My work follows three family lines:
The Stein, Roßner and Schliewen family is my mother’s side. They were mill owners in Saxony, a bacteriologist in Berlin, and a graphic artist who became a flying instructor. Their papers include letters in Sütterlin that no one in the family could read for two generations.
The Aston, Lux and Klausmann family is my father’s side. They were coal miners from the Forest of Dean, and miners and furnace workers from a German-speaking town in the Carpathians, who came to the coalfields of Pennsylvania.
The Wills family is my husband’s side. Their story is reconstructed almost entirely from public records: a Cornish boy, a workhouse, and a Barnardo’s crossing to Canada.
How I work. The detective part means following a record through archives, museums and distant cousins in several countries until a name or a date is settled, or until I can say plainly that it isn’t. Every claim has a source note. Uncertain readings are marked. Where accounts disagree, I set out the disagreement rather than choosing the tidier version. And I ask the living before they, or their parents’ words, appear in print.
The papers also taught me to be an archivist. I’ve learned as I go how to handle fragile originals, scan them properly and store them safely, and I arrange the digital archive the way archives do: by person, then by series, with consistent names and numbering and a note of where each item came from.
I read only a little German. Most of the handwritten letters were transcribed by the volunteers of the Sütterlinstube in Hamburg; others were transcribed with AI, and uncertain readings are marked. Most of the English translations were made with AI and are printed beside the German so that any reader can check them. I also use AI to help turn my research into readable text. The research, the decisions and the responsibility for what is published are mine. Method and sources explains how this works, book by book.
Before any of this, I spent ten years as a skydiver, BASE jumper and aerial stunt performer, then stepped away to become a mother. I came to graphic design afterwards, and hold a degree in Applied Art and Design. My grandfather Georg Schliewen was a graphic artist and aviator of the 1930s, so I came to his flying from the other side of the story. I am the fourth woman in my mother’s line to keep these papers, and my grandmother Charlotte’s namesake.