HeartlandAncestry Research
HeartlandAncestry Research traces family lines through obituaries, death certificates, county histories, ship manifests, and the Library of Congress newspaper archive — then turns the records into something your family will actually read: written biographies, an interactive family site, and heirloom books. Not just a chart of names and dates.
Reference project: 11 generations · 286 people · 259 written biographies
Every claim sourced. Every ancestor gets a story.
What we do
Every engagement produces documents you keep forever — nothing locked behind a subscription, no walled platforms.
We start from you (or a grandparent) and work backward as far as the records honestly go — census, vital records, immigration, newspapers, land and probate.
Each documented ancestor gets a readable, sourced story — where they lived, what they did, what happened to them — not a bare list of dates.
A private, self-contained web page with a clickable tree. Every box opens to that person's story. Works on any phone, shareable with the whole family, yours to keep.
A full narrative family history — chapters by generation, photos, timelines, and source appendices — bound in hardcover as a keepsake to pass down through the whole family.
Pricing
Professional genealogy firms charge $100–$200 an hour — a full, multi-generation family history routinely runs $3,000 to $10,000+ and takes months, then hands you a written report. No book, no website, nothing to pass down. Every package here is a flat rate agreed before work starts.
Your whole family history, digital
$1,295
Turnaround · 4–6 weeks
Start digitalEverything digital — plus the book in your hands
$1,995
Turnaround · 6–8 weeks
Build the heirloomGift a Tree — every package can be purchased as a gift, with a keepsake gift card (emailed or printed) for the family member whose story it is.
| Service | What it covers | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Extra hardcover copies | Additional casebound books for siblings, parents, grandparents — printed and shipped. | $195 each |
| Extra keepsake USB drives | Additional wood keepsake drives, each loaded with the complete archive — one for every branch of the family. | From $33 (by size) |
| Animated migration video | A short film tracing your family's journey across the map — Old World origins, the ocean crossing, and the road to where they finally settled. Custom to your tree. | $195 |
| Hosted family site | We keep your interactive family site online and refresh it once a year as new records surface. Billed annually from launch. | $199/yr |
| Tree audit & cleanup | Already have an Ancestry/GEDCOM tree? We verify it against original records, flag wrong attachments and misidentified spouses, merge duplicates, and heal floating branches. You get a corrections report. | $175 |
| Brick-wall research | Focused research on one stuck ancestor, with a written findings memo either way. | $250 flat |
What we uncover
Every family tree holds people like these — a name on a census line who turns out to have a whole life behind it. The following are illustrative of the kind of history documentary research recovers.
A fifth-great-grandfather remembered only as “a farmer back east” — recovered from a Continental Army muster roll, a worn pension application, and a fading headstone. Suddenly he has a regiment, a winter encampment, and a widow who spent years fighting the government to collect what she was owed.
The immigrant ancestor nobody could name — a young woman who crossed the Atlantic alone in steerage, found in a ship’s manifest, a naturalization paper, and a parish register in the village she left behind. The family finally learns the town, the ship, and the year she started over.
A Civil War private the family had lost track of — pulled from regimental rolls, a widow’s pension file, and a county history, and restored to the tree with the battles he fought and the farm he came home to.
Your family has stories like these. We find them, source every claim to an original record, and write them into a history you can hold — a recent full project ran eleven generations and more than 280 people across five countries, every one documented.
How it works
Tell us what you know — names, dates, family stories, the box of photos nobody has opened. We pick the right package and quote a flat price. 30 minutes, no obligation.
We work backward through census, vital records, immigration, land, probate, and newspaper archives. You get a mid-point progress note so there are no surprises.
Every connection gets checked against original records before it goes in your tree. Wrong-family attachments and duplicate people are the most common errors in hobby trees — we clear them before writing a word.
Biographies get written, the interactive site gets built, and (for Heirloom projects) chapters, photos, and timelines come together into the print manuscript.
You get every file — the site, the documents, the sources — plus a walkthrough of what we found. It's yours permanently; nothing lives behind a login.
FAQ
It happens — courthouse fires, common names, pre-1850 gaps. We'll tell you where the trail honestly ends and why, with a written note on what was searched. We don't pad trees with guesses to make them look deeper, and if a line dead-ends much earlier than expected, we adjust the price to match the work.
Very — as a starting map, not as evidence. Hobby trees usually contain wrong-family attachments and duplicated people (most do, before an audit). The Tree Audit add-on verifies what you have; packages build on whatever survives verification.
No. Everything is delivered as files you own: a self-contained web page that works offline, PDFs, and documents. There's no platform, no login, and no recurring fee.
DNA tells you ethnicity percentages and matches you to relatives. It doesn't tell you your great-great-grandmother's name, what happened to the family farm, or why the family left Italy. That's documentary research — the two are complementary, and we can use DNA matches you already have as clues.
Names and approximate dates for your parents and grandparents get us moving. Anything more — family Bibles, old photos, an existing tree, funeral cards — accelerates it. A missing detail is never a blocker; finding it is the job.
Yes. Research sometimes surfaces surprises — unexpected parents, first marriages nobody mentioned. We flag them to you privately first, and you decide what appears in family-facing documents.
Get started
Tell us one grandparent's name and where the family thinks it came from, or ask anything about how the process works. We'll email you back to answer questions and set up a free call — before you spend a dollar.
or write us directly at [email protected]