The researcher behind Famhisto

Ian Andrews

Thirty years of finding what’s hidden in data

I’m Ian Andrews. Before family history became my profession, I spent three decades as a technical specialist and solution architect for companies including Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard — work that was, at its heart, the same job I do now: taking a sprawl of incomplete, contradictory information and finding the truth in it.

Genealogy rewards exactly that discipline. Records mislead. Ages drift between censuses. Names are spelt four ways in four documents. The difference between a family tree that’s right and one that’s merely plausible is rigour — checking every claim against original sources, and being honest about the difference between proven, probable and possible.

How I work

• Sources first. Every fact in your report is cited to an original record you can see for yourself — never copied from someone else’s online tree.
• Honesty over hope. If your research can’t succeed, I tell you before you spend anything. If a finding is uncertain, the report says so.
• Stories, not spreadsheets. The deliverable is a narrative your family will actually read — what these people did, where they lived, what their world was like.
• Your story, your copyright. Everything I produce for you is yours, outright.

Where I work

From Wokingham in Berkshire, with regular visits to the county record offices and The National Archives at Kew. Clients are everywhere — research, calls and delivery all work beautifully by post and video.

A personal note

People sometimes apologise for their family being “probably quite boring”. In thirty years of looking at data, and a good few looking at families, I have never once found this to be true. Railway firemen, laundresses, soldiers, publicans, emigrants who wrote home and ones who didn’t — every family is a doorway into history. Yours too.