Airloom Genealogy

About Me

My family has a long history in Muskoka and a longer one in Ontario. I come from United Empire Loyalist stock, ancestors who came north after the Revolution and counted John Graves Simcoe among their friends. I grew up in Colorado but spent every summer of my childhood up here, and genealogy started for me as a way of understanding all of that. The names on the road signs and the people in the cemetery down the way were relatives, and I wanted to know how. That was more than twenty years ago now. Most of my research has been in Canadian and American records, with a little British Isles and Norway thrown in for good measure. I hold a Master of Science degree in Counseling Psychology from the University of Phoenix in Colorado, and I completed my genealogy training through the University of Strathclyde. The counseling background is more useful here than it sounds, because family history is rarely tidy, and a good part of my work is holding what a family believes about itself alongside what the records actually say. These days that work is mostly Canadian-side archival research for Canadian citizenship by descent cases, the records that are not online and often not indexed at all. A Canadian search usually means a letter, a parish register, and a wait, and there is nothing quite like the morning the envelope or the email finally shows up with the exact document inside. A baptism that exists in exactly one parish register, in one box, in one archive, is very satisfying to get my hands on. My wife and I talked about moving to Canada almost as soon as we met, and six years later, we are here. We live on Lake Muskoka in the summer and in Collingwood through the winter, and I am still finding relatives in the cemetery down the road. Having gone through the Permanent Resident process alongside her, I am thrilled that I get to be a part of helping other people find their own way to Canada.