One person, two kinds of stories worth getting right.
Some people know me from spreadsheets and coordination plans. Others know me as “the genealogist”: the guy in my congregation you go to when you’ve hit a brick wall in your family tree. Both are true, and honestly, both come from the same place.
How I think
Give me a messy problem, a stalled project, a tangled family line, a system nobody’s documented, and I want to take it apart, find the pattern, and build something that makes the next person’s path easier. That’s shown up in a 3rd-generation real estate career (I’m a former Designated Broker), in a run at City Council (lost by 512 votes, close enough to keep me honest about local politics), and in years spent building the coordination systems I now use in project and right-of-way work. It also shows up every time I open a new genealogy case.
Where it started
My path hasn’t been a straight line. I grew up partly in Belgium and Brazil, picked up French and Portuguese as a kid, and later served a mission in South Texas and Uruguay, teaching domestic violence and alcohol counseling classes in Spanish. Along the way, with my wife Brenda, I’ve run coin laundries, a maintenance company, and now Funtime Services, a vending business. I’ve built and rebuilt more than once, professionally and personally.
The discovery that changed things
The genealogy didn’t start early. It started in my 50s, when my wife took a DNA test. She’d been adopted as a baby in a closed-adoption state, and neither of us knew where the results would lead. What followed was part detective work, part race against time, and it cracked something open in me. One discovery led to another, then another. They still do.
I started sharing what I found. People started asking questions. Before long, my congregation had given me a nickname, “the genealogist,” and I was teaching others how to do the same work: how to read a record, follow a thread, and find the people who are waiting to be found.
Why both matter to me
I believe in building things that outlast the person who built them: whether that’s a coordination system that makes a project team’s life easier, or a family tree that gives someone’s grandkids a place to stand. Systems for work. Stories for family. Same instinct, two directions.
If you’re here for the family history side, [see how I work with clients →]. If you’re here for the systems and project management side, [take a look →].