I'm a genealogist and historical researcher. I find the people the history books skipped, and rebuild their lives from what they left behind: census returns, court reports, prison and reformatory registers, newspaper columns.

It started with my own family. Tracing my ancestors, I kept finding people who had been left behind in the records, everyday men and women whose stories were incredible, tragic, or just plain unbelievable, and who nobody had looked at in well over a century.

I started this in 2023 as Yourfamilyline, a genealogy research service helping people trace their own ancestors. Over time it became something bigger: long-form documentaries about forgotten lives, built record by record. Now it's called Dead Ordinary.

Why Dead Ordinary? Because on paper, that's what the people in my videos were: labourers, servants, paupers, petty thieves. Nobody wrote their biographies. But every one of them was somebody, and their lives are still there in the archives for anyone willing to look. My job is bringing the dead ordinary back to life.

This website is the archive for all of it: every story, with the documentary and a full list of the sources I used. My mission hasn't changed. Every ancestor, no matter how humble, has a story worth telling. Thank you for being here and for helping me share them.