How a trace works
People carry names they didn't choose. A surname from a trade, a first name from a grandparent, one picked off a list in the last minute. Most of it goes unread, like the fine print on your own life.
A trace is me reading it.
I start with the first record: a baptism, a census, a tax roll, a monastery ledger. The first time the name appears, spelled the way you spell it. Then I follow it forward. Names travel through languages and lose pieces on the way; they get shortened, shifted, made official, made ordinary.
I look for the turn, the moment a name stops being decoration and starts being weight. In my own trace the turn was an exile: Florence, 1302, thrown out and never let back. What the name carries now was built outside the walls.
What you get: one page. The line of the name from first record to now, sources at the bottom, so you can check them yourself. If the honest finding is that the trail ends in a parish register in 1640, or that the name is younger than your grandmother, that's what you get. I don't decorate.
$25, delivered as a document within 48 hours. The first few, this week.
Send me a name: [email protected]