Welcome to Family Line: Genealogy
Family Line offer substantial expertise and experience in genealogy research, DNA analysis, and family tree building.
The family run business traces some of its own genealogy lines back for over 1,000 years. Coming from a family with a long line of royalty, and one where a family line has lived on the same farm since 1000CE and recorded the family genealogy throughout that time, we know from experience that there are probably many interesting discoveries to be made, and stories to be uncovered, in your family tree. Not only do we offer our professional genealogy expertise, but we are are trained to provide excellence in research, report writing, and documentation. We can assist in several languages, including fluency in English and Norwegian, working competence in Swedish and Danish, as well as Old Norse, Old English, French and German. We provide family tree and ancestral research for clients from all over the world and specialise in New Zealand, Australia, Norway, and Great Britain. We can also assist with Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Germany (including Jewish genealogy), and some other parts of Western Europe, and North America. We have access to millions of genealogical records and are happy to work on small and large projects, or on an hourly basis. We welcome any inquiries to discuss your needs. To start, please email whatever information you know about the line or lines, or the particular problem, that you would like us to research. Please write down whatever names, dates, places and occupations you know, links to any relevant family trees or DNA results. We will come back to you to confirm that we can help, and confirm costs and terms of engagement. Please email us to start the discussion: help@familyline.org |
Want to know who your ancestors are? Need to check on heirs for a deceased estate? Need to trace your line for passports? Want to know who your living relatives are? Email us to start the discussion.
Examples of our Work:
Disappearing Jewish Families
A client believed that they had Ashkenazi German Jewish heritage, but there were no Jewish people within their extended family. Researching the German line of the family tree we found a long line of ancestors with clearly Jewish last names, around the late 1700s and early 1800s. At that point, the Jewish names disappeared abruptly, and it appeared that there had been rapid intermarriage of the women into Lutheran families. The abrupt disappearance of the Jewish names coincided with the widespread persecution of Jews in part of Germany at that time. Being Jewish was dangerous. Later on, a modern day family member visited Germany, and discovered that records for births and marriages had been ripped out of the official books and destroyed. It was believed that this happened around the time that the Nazis came to power. The Nazis murdered people who weren't Jews, but who had a even a small portion of Jewish heritage. The destruction of these records, like the earlier sudden intermarriages, were motivated by the need to survive. Although some of the original family had stayed in Germany, the branch we were interested in, had migrated to England, then Australia, and then New Zealand, with some later returning to Australia. |
The Hidden Nazi
For decades there had been vague rumours that an anti-Nazi Norwegian family had had an active Nazi member, during the time that Nazi Germany ruled Norway. The secret was shameful and not spoken about other than to say that his life ended near the end of World War II. For our client, it had been impossible to identify who, in the family tree, was the Nazi, and what they had actually done. We had access to a large family tree, and created a list of fighting age men who died between 1943-1946. We found that almost the entire family had been politically active, and there were decades of records recording the details of this. We discarded people who had clearly belonged to left wing organisations before Germany invaded, on the basis that it was unlikely that such men became enthusiastic Nazis. We were left with three common last names so we then researched these men in newspapers of that period. It was clear that details has been scrubbed and it was difficult to find any refence to a senior member of the community, but, then, at last, one old magazine had an article which identified him and the things that he had done. As a senior member of the Norwegian community, he had the power to profit, and to allow others to profit, from the sale of property belonging to Jews who had been deported from Norway to the German concentration camps. The news was disturbing to the client, but they were glad to have found the details of the secret that had been on their mind for a very long time. |
What Happened to my Grandfather?
An older client had always had a heavy heart as she had never understood what had happened to her grandfather. She grew up in an age where it was believed to be impolite to ask questions, so she had lived with anxiety and unanswered trauma, for decades. The client asked us to find out. Quite quickly we were able to discover that the grandfather had abandoned the grandmother, with several young children, in Wellington, New Zealand, in the late 1800s. To this day, nobody knows how the grandmother survived, as she had no family in New Zealand, and there were no government benefits. But what had happened to the grandfather? A combination of clever family history reconstruction, assisted by DNA, and shipping records, showed that the grandfather had disappeared to Australia, changed his name and had several more children to another woman, before eventually marrying her. We interviewed a present day member of that family who didn't know how this man had originally arrived in their family, or his background. The interview was pleasant and we solved several mysteries for our client, and for the later, unknowing, Australian family. But there was more. As part of the investigation we discovered that prior to the grandfather and grandmother being married, the grandfather had been married to another woman in England, and there were more children of that union. It seemed that the grandfather was a rogue, and that he had abandoned at least two women and many children, and had gone to the trouble of changing his name and moving to Australia to hide. Despite all this, our client was glad that the mystery was solved, and that the Australian family were nice, especially given the circumstances. |
Beliefs About Long Ago Relatives Dashed
The client told me that his grandmother was French and had been adopted by an English family. He wanted to know more about his French ancestry. The first clue that something wasn't quite as it seemed was that while the grandmother had a name that could be French, so did several generations older than her, who were firmly English. The second clue was that the "French" grandmother's genes linked to her alleged adoptive parents, indicating that they were her biological parents. I contacted the English side of the family and was told firmly that the grandmother was not adopted. That the grandmother was French and had been adopted seemed unlikely, however, there was a mystery: the grandmother had been able to speak French from an early age and she had assured my client that she was French. What was the answer? The grandmother's baby brother was born within a few months of her, but he died within a few weeks of his birth. Then the mother died fairly soon afterwards. In the 1870s there was an increase in French women coming to England to work as governesses. Not all cases can have a happy ending (in this case it would have been confirmation of the grandmother's adoption and that she had been born French), but we discovered the truth about that and gently explained it to our client. As far as the unresolved mystery of how the grandmother could speak French, and firmly believed she was adopted, our working theory is that perhaps when her father suffered the tragedy of losing his son and wife, while having a young child to care for, that a French Governess was brought into the family to help out, and that was how the little girl learnt French. |
Family Tree Work Leads to New Citizenship
There are many examples where proof of a family line can mean that someone is entitled to hold a second, or third, citizenship and passport. In this client's case there were unmarried parents, and the proof had to go through the father to his father. Proof of paternity was accepted through genealogical DNA testing, which also showed that the client was related to the grandfather, who she had never met. We also had to obtain proof that the grandfather was in the foreign country in a particular year, and that the father had travelled there at least once before 1948. The foreign authorities were going to ask for a pile of other proofs, but we were able to show that what we had given them proved the essential facts that were required. It was accepted. After the case was examined by the relevant authorities in the other country, a Certificate of Citizenship was issued. Family tree work is usually the starting point for cases like this (claims of citizenship, Jewish claims based on losses during World War II, etc), but often this is not enough, and other materials must be researched, including transport records, census records, and DNA (not always required). Some governments require original marriage and birth certificates. Cases like this have steps that need to be methodically worked through, and then success! |
The Murderer
A client was researching Norwegian history when they came across a list of people executed by the state for serious crimes. They immediately recognised one of the names as being a traditional family name, and wanted to know more. It was very hard to locate this person in any family tree records, and we believe that, like others who have brought shame on their families, that someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to scrub him from all records. It took some time, but we located a four person family tree from the Middle Ages that included the name of this man. While we cannot accept other people's family trees as being accurate without checking, this tiny tree included another last name that matched a last name in the tree that we had constructed for the client. The first names were different but it did indicate a possible direction for research, to see where the man fitted in. Eventually a match was made and checked and the man's place in the family tree was established. He was not a blood or direct relative. Nevertheless, there appeared to an interesting story behind the case. We were able to find out who the man was, how his life had been, and the events that had led to him killing someone. In a nutshell, he had been lied to and deceived about a tiny plot of land that he was to receive, and he was then provoked and ridiculed, actions that led to the killing. Killing can't be condoned, but in many Western countries, we believe that had this happened now, this would have been a lower degree of manslaughter, and not capital murder. |