Welcome
to Unsolved Histories! I’m Liesa
Healy-Miller, and this is my forensic genealogy practice. I specialize in cases with legal
implications – lost or missing heir search, quiet title research, adoption
search, and more.
The
name is new, but the business is not.
I’ve worked as a professional genealogist for several years now –
tracing people throughout Southern New England and beyond.
I’ve
skittered along the East Coast, plunged into the depths of the Deep South, and traversed
the pond to Dublin. There I searched
for names in record books shredded by bullets during the Irish Civil War. How cool is that? Love what I do!
Ironically,
though, it was the depth and breadth of my searches – both real and virtual –
that helped me to narrow my career focus. While I love tracing the past, I wanted to do more
than just reconstruct a family’s history.
Don’t
get me wrong – tracing family history is painstaking, important work. And it definitely affects living
descendants – hopefully in positive ways.
But
I crave impact. As a former TV
reporter, I guess I haven’t overcome the need to see and feel the results of my
work. In my former calling, the
payoff from the work could be swift and dramatic. And I produced something tangible every day – my story,
airing each night on the six o’clock news.
Impact? Drama? If that’s what I want, why choose genealogy? There’s no nightly deadline, and the
world is definitely not watching. By
its nature, the work is often ploddingly slow, meticulous, and filled with
attention to minute detail. It can
also be maddeningly frustrating.
And solitary.
So
why am I doing this? And why
forensic genealogy, specifically?
In
this business, the payoff is not usually swift. But with age comes patience, and the willingness to wait for
those twin payoffs of impact and drama.
And,
with patience, I still get those payoffs - the thrill of the chase, the
challenge of tackling an unsolved mystery, and – most importantly – that feeling
of passion for my work that comes straight from the soul.
In
this context, “drama” means finding that elusive heir. Or telling that adoptee: “I’ve found
your birthmother, and she’s dying to meet you.” Talk about
having an impact on someone’s life.
In
my spare time, it’s helping to identify unclaimed remains, or
offering
advice on how to solve the seemingly unsolvable historical mystery.
I
like “Unsolved Mysteries” as a business name – but that phrase will forever
conjure images of Robert Stack in a trench coat. That show will live on in reruns for the rest of our natural
lives – and beyond. It’s safe to
say that name is taken.
Instead,
I’ve chosen a different new name for my same old venture: Unsolved
Histories. “History” is often used
as a collective term. But we all
have our own histories. They are
unique to us, and only us.
The
plural form of that word honors that sense of singularity, the intricate twists
and turns that each life takes. And my passionate quest to untangle
those threads - to solve the family mysteries that cross my life’s path.
Thanks
for coming along for the ride!