User:FrontPorchGenealogy

= Front Porch Genealogy =

Front Porch Genealogy helps you build and share your family tree and preserve the stories that shaped your family.

Services
• Building multi-generational family trees • Attacking research problems (maiden names, common names, re-marriages, etc.) • Identifying distant cousins • Writing and editing family histories for preservation and sharing: from simple binders, to professional reports and charts, to bound photo and narrative books, to digital archives

Family history is a collaboration—the more leads and stories, from more sources, the more likely you are to figure it out. Front Porch Genealogy enlarges your effort, edits out extraneous details and dead ends, and keeps you moving forward.

Front Porch Genealogy founder Bill Bernardy
Bill was trained as a teacher and counselor, before doing an MBA at Stanford. After building successful businesses in advertising and market research, he has turned his research and writing skills to a long-standing personal interest in family history.

Bill began work on his own family tree in a project for a high school history class. Some 8,000 ancestors and distant cousins later, he has traced his roots to families that settled along the shores of Lake Michigan in the 1840s, and back 5 generations in Europe.

Bill has been helping others build their family trees for several years. He has researched families in about 40 states, used most online resources, been to numerous cemeteries, family history centers, and the Family History Library, poured through biographies, local histories, obituaries, and city directories, and interviewed family members to capture their stories.

A sixth-generation Chicagoan, much of Bill's work has focused on the German and Irish settlers of that city and the surrounding Midwest. Like many branches of his family, he migrated west and his research followed earlier groups through the prairie states to the inter-mountain region, and on to the West Coast and the Northwest.

Now based in Bend, Oregon, Bill has helped families throughout the U.S. trace their family history and re-connect with distant cousins.

Bill is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, the Global Alliance of Genealogy Professionals, and the Chicago Genealogical Society.

Learn more at FrontPorchGenealogy.com.