I come from a long line of storytellers. Amazing tales of World War II underground resistance, the Fenian Rising against the English, bank thieves, Napoleon and Egyptian queens filled my young mind with wonder and developed my lifelong passion for history. They also had me searching for documented proof and led me to a professional career working in libraries, archives and museums.

Since obtaining my Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Western Ontario in 2006 I have worked in universities, private collections, corporate archives and with Church Diocese records. There isn’t a record type I haven’t seen! Most recently I spent over a decade working for the University of Oxford, both in the Special Collections department of the Bodleian Libraries and at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History as Head of Print and Digital Collections.

Immersed in all that history, I have always been most interested in the stories of ordinary people, and those whose stories are often not told; woman, children, working people, those from ethic and religious minorities. It was this passion that led me to make a career shift and become a Genealogist.

 My areas of expertise fall into three main areas;

• The importance of academic research methods in genealogical research and going beyond the vital records to really tell the stories of our ancestors and those that lived in our communities, particularly in England, Ireland, Scotland, The Netherlands and Canada.

• Preservation of paper and digital records and the digitisation of historic records using database and big data methodology.

• Extensive leadership and hands-on experience in the development of online databases and catalogues of archival collections and the digitisation of historical documents.