I’m a historian.

I have been researching the Penobscot River for years. The river is also part of my own geography. I grew up in the Bangor area, visited Fort Knox as a kid, and knew the Penobscot long before I began studying its history.

The project traces more than two and a half centuries of conflict along the river. I am interested in why the Penobscot kept becoming strategically important, and what changed when control of the river changed hands.

The answer is not simply military. The same geography that made the Penobscot valuable in wartime also connected people to fisheries, the fur trade, timber, transportation, shipping, and eventually industry. The project follows those relationships from the seventeenth century through the American Revolution, the War of 1812, Maine statehood, industrialization, and the Civil War era.

My archival research is both in person and online. I have worked with collections at the University of Maine, DAR National Library, VCU Special Collections, Cabell Library, Library of Virginia, Stephens Memorial Library at the Penobscot Marine Museum, Maine Historical Society, Castine Historical Society, and the National Archives, including Department of the Navy records.

I also do extensive research in digitized archives and databases. My work has included Maine Memory Network, Ancestry, FamilySearch, Fold3, MyHeritage, Findmypast, Geneanet, Storied, Filae, Find a Grave, and 10 Million Names. I use online collections not simply to locate names, but to reconstruct people, families, communities, and events across records held by different institutions.

I have also worked as an archivist at Beth Ahabah Museum and Archives and as an exhibition curator at VCU’s Murry N. DePillars Gallery.

I founded G.E.M. Genealogy after working as a DAR Staff Genealogist. My professional research includes lineage and citizenship cases, French Canadian and early French-American records, minority lineage, and difficult documentary proof problems.

At DAR, I served on the French & Spanish Committee and Minority Lineage Committee. I have also contributed record transcription and cemetery documentation through projects including FamilySearch, Find a Grave, and 10 Million Names.