About
Solving Your Mysteries

A life spent
searching for stories

Hi, I’m Brittany, the researcher and founder behind Solving Your Mysteries. My journey into genealogy didn’t begin with this business, or even the idea of it, but with a book.

When I was eleven, I found a family history book hidden in the back of a dusty and dark closet. It had been published in 1997 by a distant cousin on my mom’s side of the family. I was instantly engrossed and amazed by this object. I would sit on the living room floor for hours on end, reading and rereading, memorizing the names and the dates, finding all the locations on a map. I would imagine and build family lines in my head long before I even understood what genealogy was, or that you could research it. But even then, I didn’t just want the information in the book. I wanted more. I wanted to fill in the gaps that I saw, I wanted to trace back the family lines even further. What did these people look like? What were their occupations? Where did they come from?

When I was a teenager, I remember my mom and her sister and my grandmother and I would drive four hours north of where we lived just so I could sit in a courthouse archive for hours and pour over wills and leases, newspapers and more. I learned to interpret handwriting, how to notice patterns in addresses and occupations, and I slowly began to fill in some of the gaps I’d had questions about. I was so lucky that through word-of-mouth of my research, I got in contact with the woman who had written the original book! I met her. She invited my family into her house to discuss our long dead ancestors. I remember being terrified, but so determined to ask her all the questions I had been holding on to.

Nearly thirty years later, I am in the process of rewriting that book. What was once a compiled history spanning two hundred years is now being expanded, corrected, and strengthened with historical context and new discoveries. I hope to finish it soon and send her a copy - a continuation of the work she began. Work like this demands patience, restraint, and the willingness to build a case slowly, rather than chase a theory because it's convenient.

Those principles were not shaped only in archives and courthouses, but also by my grandmother’s story.

My grandmother was adopted during World War II. She knew nothing about her biological parents, and she didn’t want to. I remember asking her once if she ever wanted to know more about her biological family. She said, “I give you permission that when I die, you can look into it”. And so I said, “Okay”. I continued researching every other line of my family, including her adopted parents. I built our tree using the original, clunky genealogy websites that no longer exist.

And then DNA testing entered the market. I knew I needed to do this. My grandmother offered to buy it for me, and then casually, quietly, asked me to include a kit for herself. I didn’t question this or make a big deal out of it; I didn’t want her to back out. Her only goal was to know her ethnicity. Little did I know that this one small decision would lay the foundation for what would come.

For months, I studied her DNA matches in secret. I never told her what I was doing. I taught myself how to cluster relatives, analyze shared centimorgans, and map overlapping surnames. I reconstructed family networks from just fragments. I learned how to build family trees with barely any information. I learned what a fourth cousin twice removed was. One evening, during my senior year of high school, I had had enough of the guesswork and constant frustration of hitting dead-ends and brickwalls. I spent hours at the dining room table, taping together dozens of pieces of graph paper to map out her DNA matches using colored pens, markers, and highlighters. Very quickly the table disappeared beneath my work. That was the night I identified one of her biological parents.

It would take another year for my theory to be proven, when her half-sister just so happened to take a DNA test. We spoke over the phone, and now, years later, we are still in contact. Neither one of them ever knew about the other, and from there, we found family we never knew existed.

Those two experiences have shaped everything about what I know and how I approach genealogy today. I understand the emotional complexity of this work, and how to handle sensitive discoveries. Genealogy is detective work, but it also needs to remain ethical. I don’t try to guess the information. I don’t copy unsourced online trees. And I don’t force records to fit a theory. I build structured research plans, test hypotheses, and evaluate conflicting evidence. All my research is clearly documented and proven, and I acknowledge uncertainty when it exists.