About the Press

My involvement with researching my ancestors goes back to my teenage years, when my uncle began sharing the family research he had gathered over his own lifetime. In those days, researching family history meant going back to the countries our ancestors came from and reviewing the records in county and parish offices.

When I took over responsibility for maintaining our family history from him, the work began again with a single compact disc. It held the telephone directories of the United States, issued long before family history moved online. Every listing that shared the family surname was searched out, and to each one a letter went by post, on paper, carrying the same plain question: are we related?

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That search was never closed. It was reopened the next year, and every year after — corrected, extended, brought up to date. Then modern methods changed the work again. Parish books and county records that once meant a journey overseas can now be called up from home, and a search that took a season by post takes a sitting.

Reaching the records is only the beginning. Downloading those files from archives overseas brings complications of its own. Outside the United States, the records are rarely in English: they were kept in the local language of each parish and county, and written in handwriting styles that were in use as long as three hundred years ago — scripts few readers today can make out. So we have developed our own tools to translate and transcribe these old documents, and from them we recreate the family's history. The tools have changed many times over. The habit has not: find the record, check what it says, and state plainly where it runs out.

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For a long time the work stayed within one family. Then came a neighbor's family, then the families of friends, and then of their friends. Their response is the reason the Press exists.

Orcas Island Press is that work, carried on — made deep in the woods of Orcas Island, Washington, where the craft has been honed one family at a time. Each history is researched in the records, written as narrative, and bound to be kept: one book at a time, made on the island, in the woods.