Your family's history isn't lost.
It's undrawn.
A working guide to researching, recording, and preserving your family's story — built from forty-eight years of real casework, not theory.
Featured on PBS · Telly, AVA & Communicator Award–winning documentarian · trusted by Xavier & Dillard Universities
Instant download · PDF, 69 pages · workbook included
Every family story follows the same three moves.
Research
Start from a single fragment — a name, a date, a word that doesn't belong — and follow it into census lines, court records, wills, and archives.
Record
Interview the relatives who still remember, and source every detail to something real: a document, a timestamp, a name.
Reveal
Turn documented fact into a story worth passing down — in a book, a film, or an afternoon around the table.
The Record Speaks.
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Rule one
Every claim in this book, and every claim you make about your own family, is sourced to something real — a document, a recording, a name.
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Rule two
Every gap in the record is named as a gap. Not filled in, not guessed at, not smoothed over for the sake of a better story.
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Rule three
When the research is lost — to time, to disaster, to a box nobody labeled — it gets rebuilt. The story is worth the difficulty of finding it twice.
The word that started it: "Portugal"
In 1978, one unexplained word in an 1880 census record sent the author on a decades-long search — through a sale record, three notarial wills, and an eleven-year courtroom battle in Assumption Parish, Louisiana. It ended in a documented freedom judgment and seven generations of descendants.
Along the way, Hurricane Katrina destroyed the original research archive. It was rebuilt from scratch, parish by parish.
Prologue
New Orleans Public Library, 1978Twenty minutes. That was all I had left on the clock. I was twenty-three years old, on the third floor of the New Orleans Public Library, finishing a service call for Eastman Kodak — a jammed microfilm reader, nothing more. The job was done before I meant it to be. I had a roll of the 1880 census already threaded, and twenty minutes to kill before my next stop.
I found my grandfather's people, the Bosemans, and scrolled until a single column stopped me: Birthplace of Father. One word sat in it, in a stranger's careful handwriting, where no word like it belonged.
Portugal.
I didn't know that afternoon what it meant. I didn't know about Francisco Placencia, or the Canary Islands, or a courthouse in Napoleonville where a case would run for eleven years. I didn't know that a twelve-year-old girl named Louise had been sold for five hundred piastres in the parish just upriver from where I was sitting, a hundred and forty-five years before I ever read her son's birthplace column. I only knew that the word didn't make sense, and that not making sense is usually where a real story starts.
It took forty-eight years to walk through that door. It took a freedom case decided in 1853 and finally settled in 1858. It took Hurricane Katrina taking my original research with it in 2005, and years of rebuilding it, parish by parish, from nothing. It took learning, over and over, that the discipline isn't finding an answer — it's refusing to invent one when the record goes quiet.
This book is the method I used to walk through that door. Not a theory of how genealogy should work. The actual one, built on my own family, before I ever wrote a word of it down for you.
— Leonard Smith III
Nine levels, one blueprint.
Leonard Smith III
Documentarian and genealogical researcher, New Orleans. Founder of LS3 Studios. Specializes in tracing African American families through slavery-era records, plantation documents, and Freedmen's Bureau files.
- FeaturedPBS
- AwardsTelly, AVA, Communicator
- Trusted byXavier & Dillard Universities
- Based inNew Orleans, Louisiana
Templates, not just prompts.
Research log — track sources, dates, and what's still unfound.
Interview question bank — organized by relative and topic.
Primary-source checklist — wills, census, court, church records.
Documentary shot list — interviews, archive footage, b-roll.
Included free with every purchase — no separate bundle to choose.
The documentaries behind the method.
Classes, templates, and consultation calls for your own research.
Start with the fragment you already have.
Everything in this guide comes from real casework — documented families, documented records, and one method for turning both into a story that lasts.
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