SALTPRINT Genealogical research &
Heirloom family books · Chicago Client login

We find what was kept, and prove what it shows.

A Chicago-based genealogical practice. Documented research at five levels, and a bound heirloom volume at the end of it.

A carte de visite of a seated woman and a standing man, both in dark clothing, photographed in a studio against a plain backdrop. She rests one arm on a carved table; he stands beside her with a hand at her shoulder. The card's mount is worn at the corners and stained along the lower edge. The back of the same card, worn and foxed. A photographer's printed emblem sits in the middle — a crown above an oval reading Photographische Anstalt, and beneath it the name J. B. Pohle, Mainz. Across and around it, several different hands have written in pencil: names, numbers and what may be dates, overlapping each other and mostly illegible.
A carte de visite of Christian and Catherine Eichenold, made in Mainz, Germany — the front, and its back. The printed part is the photographer's. Everything else was added later, by more than one person, and none of it says who is on the front.

Most families have a box. An album with corners coming loose, a folder of certificates, a name someone wrote on the back of a photograph and never explained.

That box is evidence, and it is almost never enough on its own. The work is establishing what it actually proves — which names hold up against the record, which are family tradition, and which are simply wrong. Then finding the documents that fill what is missing.

An open wooden drawer of family papers, part-sorted. A hand lifts a folded document covered in faded handwriting. Around it, black-and-white photographs lie loose among stacks of letters and cards, several still in card mounts with worn corners. A second drawer above holds more of the same, packed upright.

How far back?

It is the first question everyone asks, and the hardest one to answer with a price. As far as the records allow is a hope rather than a plan — it gives neither of us anything to hold on to, and it is how a project quietly becomes open-ended.

So the depth is settled in advance and does not move. In every book we work toward your great-great-grandparents — up to sixteen people, born for most American families somewhere between 1800 and 1860, which is exactly where the records begin to thin and the work slows down. Settling that line before we begin is what lets me give you a real figure rather than a guess.

What you choose is width. How many of the sixteen should your book take in?

Some lines stop whatever the budget — adoption, unknown parentage, records that burned. The book says which of yours were reached, which were not, and why.

Level 1 is not shown — a report answers a question rather than tracing a line, so it has no width to draw. Each fan widens as it comes inward because a single grandparent stands in front of four great-great-grandparents.

If you want one line followed further, to the ancestor who crossed the ocean or the one who fought in a war, that is a Deep Line Extension and it is quoted on its own.

The five levels

Not every family history starts with a book. Some start with a single question, or with a DNA result nobody has been able to make sense of. Level 1 exists to break one specific deadlock — a single defined question, answered and documented.

Level 1 — A written report

Level 1 exists to help solve specific research mysteries or brick walls encountered in your family history. One defined question: a contested link, an unidentified person, a difficult origin to confirm, a common-surname conflict, or a DNA result nobody can make sense of. If you go on to commission a book at any level within six months of your report's delivery, the full report fee comes off your price.

Covers a question, a record set, or a DNA result · not a line traced  ·  You receive: Written report, PDF, fully cited

Level 2 — The Couple Study

One ancestral couple, followed from meeting to grave. Two of your sixteen great-great-grandparents, and the one great-grandparent they share. The smallest object that is still a book rather than a report.

Covers One ancestral couple · 2 of your 16  ·  You receive: Bound volume

Level 3 — The Targeted Book

One grandparent’s line, a quarter of the fan. Four of your sixteen great-great-grandparents. The usual starting choice when one side of the family is the side with the more questions in it.

Covers One grandparent’s line · 4 of your 16  ·  You receive: Bound volume

Level 4 — The Heirloom Book

Both grandparents on one parent’s side — half the fan, eight of your sixteen great-great-grandparents. A whole parental side, maternal or paternal, of the family in one volume.

Covers Both grandparents on one parent’s side · 8 of your 16  ·  You receive: Bound volume

Level 5 — The Comprehensive Saga

All four grandparent lines. The whole fan, filled to the outer ring: sixteen great-great-grandparents, as far as the records reach. Delivered as one volume or two, depending on what the research turns out to hold.

Covers All four grandparent lines · all 16  ·  You receive: Bound volume, one or two

Every conclusion is sourced. Where the record contradicts the family story, you are told, and you are shown why. The full comparison is on the Research page.

How the work runs

There is no lengthy proposal process. Four steps, and you are not left waiting until the end to see what you bought.

What you leave with

A clear sense of what your material is likely to support, and which level fits it. No obligation either way.

What you leave with

A fixed figure in writing — not an estimate, not a range — with the lines named and the exclusions stated.

What you leave with

One agreement, signed once, with your scope attached to it and the review checkpoints written in.

What you leave with

A midpoint look at draft chapters while there is still time to redirect, and a final review of the laid-out volume before it goes to print.

Chicago, specifically

1

A great deal of this city’s paper burned in 1871, and a great deal more was never filed in the first place.

2

The streets were renumbered in 1909 and again in 1911, so an address before those years is not the address you would look for now.

3

Parish registers outlived the civil ones, and the school and ward records survived because they sat outside the fire’s path.

Working here means knowing which substitutes exist. That knowledge is the difference between the records are lost and an answer.

A ward map of Chicago from 1871, torn, folded and browned with age, with the area destroyed by the fire printed in bright red running north to south along the lake shore. The remaining wards are numbered across the rest of the city. A banner along the foot reads: Chicago as it is, showing the burnt district.
Chicago as it is, showing the burnt district — Gaylord Watson, 1871. The red is what burned. The numbered wards across the rest of the sheet are where the substitutes are.Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. Public domain by date of publication.

And not only Chicago

Chicago is where I work from, not the limit of what I work on. The research behind this practice runs across the United States coast to coast and back into the British colonies, and out again into twenty-six countries — my own families, my husband's, and the families of friends who became the first clients.

What that has actually involved: German and Nassau parish registers, Icelandic and Scandinavian farm records, Irish and English parish and civil registration, passenger manifests out of Le Havre and Bremen, colonial-era land and probate papers, military service and pension files, and orphanage and children's-home admission records — the kind held by an institution rather than a county, and reached by asking the right archive the right question.

Reflections

Nothing is published here yet. The first quotation goes in the day a client sends one and agrees in writing to the name it appears under — verbatim, never paraphrased, composed or improved.

Almost nothing of Chicago's photographic record survived the fire. What did survive, survived because a family kept it.

Start a conversation

The initial consultation is complimentary and takes about 30 minutes.

Research

Five levels, from a single question to a fully documented family history.

The standard

Research is conducted to the Genealogical Proof Standard: reasonably exhaustive search, complete and accurate source citation, analysis and correlation of the evidence, resolution of conflicting evidence, and a written conclusion. Where a finding rests on inference rather than direct evidence, the reasoning is written out so you can judge it yourself.

The Genealogical Proof Standard. The fourth element is where a family story is most often overturned, and it is the one written out at length in every report.

Where the evidence does not support a conclusion, that is reported as a finding. An unresolved question, stated plainly, is worth more than a confident guess.

How a conflict is resolved, and what happens to the account that loses. The example is illustrative and is not from a client file.

The five levels

The home page gives the shape of each level. This is the same ladder read as a research brief: what is actually searched, how many proof arguments the level carries, what the charts and index have to do, and where the level runs out.

Level What is searched Proof carried Charts & index Where it stops
1One agreed boundary — a named record set, jurisdiction or DNA result. Two to three documents transcribed in fullOne proof summary at 1-B+; a documented search below itWorking charts and maps onlyAt the boundary. If the answer lies outside it, you are told so
2One couple across their whole lives — origin, marriage, household, land or trade, children, burialOne proof summary: the couple's identity and their connection to youPedigree chart, surname indexTwo of your sixteen. Siblings appear only where they carry evidence
3One grandparent's line, plus the origin and arrival records behind itOne proof summary answering the line's central questionPedigree chart, surname index, methodology noteFour of your sixteen. The other three quarters of the fan are untouched
4Two grandparent lines, with the old country, the crossing and the settlement each searched separatelyTwo to four proof summaries, one per contested linkPedigree and ahnentafel, repository list, every-name indexEight of your sixteen — one parent's side only
5All four lines, each region of origin and settlement, plus descendant histories in Register formatEight or more full proof arguments, not summariesPedigree, ahnentafel and descendant charts; every-name and place indexAt the great-great-grandparent ring

A Deep Line Extension can be commissioned in addition at Levels 1 through 4, carrying a chosen line back beyond the boundary of that level.

Research log · page 14 Eichenold–Wölfing
German origins
Matricula — Rauenthal, Rau K 3 Wölfing baptisms 1826–30 — Hit, 27 Nov 1828
Matricula — Aschaffenburg, St. Agatha Eichenwald / Eichenold 1825–67 — Negative, not in “E” index
Stadtarchiv Mainz 1854 civil births under Wölfing — Negative, no twins
Mainz city directories, 1860 / 65 / 68 Eichenold, all spellings — Negative (0)
HHStAW Wiesbaden, Abt. 223 Nr. 1446 Amt Eltville emigration file — Hit, passport 1150
NARA M237 / AAD 30260 bark Aristides, arr. 19 Oct 1866 — Hit, household of five
Three of these six searches found no records. They stay in the log, as they are an answer, and so no one duplicates the efforts.
A page of the research log from my own family's dossier. Negative results are set in Madder and never removed.

Every level ends in a written research log listing what was searched, including the searches that found nothing — the page shown above is one. Negative results are part of the record, and a documented negative is a complete piece of work rather than a failed one.

What you receive

A report or book, the citations behind it, and the source documents themselves — scans of what was found, so the evidence stays with the family rather than only the conclusion.

Conclusion · as it appears on the page

Catharina's maiden name was Wölfing, not Binder or Singer as the family had it. Her own 1828 Rauenthal baptism and the 1859 Rauenthal marriage both name her mother, Elisabetha Wölfing, ledig — unmarried — and no father. Two exact birth dates carried in both the German registers and the American records, together with the 1866 Eltville passport, tie the Rauenthal and Aschaffenburg Catholic family directly to the Chicago Eichenolds.14

The family was therefore Catholic in Germany, and its home was Rauenthal in Nassau and Aschaffenburg in Bavaria — not Protestant Vielbrunn in the Odenwald, where three earlier sessions had been looking.15

14 Kath. Pfarrei Rauenthal (Amt Eltville, Nassau), Taufbuch Rau K 3, entry of 28 Nov 1828, Catharina Wölfing; Heiratsbuch Rau Z 3, entry of 17 Oct 1859. Digital images, Matricula, Diocese of Limburg (data.matricula-online.eu).

15 Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden, Abt. 223 (Amt Eltville) Nr. 1446, emigration file, passport 1150 (1866); corroborated by U.S. Customs passenger manifest, bark Aristides, Le Havre to New York, arr. 19 Oct 1866, NARA microfilm M237.

Note — Records access is governed by the terms of the repositories and subscription services involved. Some material cannot be republished, and where that applies it is noted at the point of use.

The Books

The deliverable at Levels 2 through 5 is a bound volume — genealogy, biography and family archive in one object.

A cloth-bound book in deep aubergine lying closed on a linen runner over a bare wooden table. The cover is blocked in silver: EICHENOLD FAMILY HISTORY. The spine reads EICHENOLD, with SALTPRINT and three diminishing dots at its foot. Beside it sit an inkwell, a dark notebook, and several loose nineteenth-century photographs.
A Level 3 volume in the house binding, titled with a family from my own research. The specification — cloth over boards, silver blocking, sewn sections — is what every book is made to.

A research report answers a question. A book is what a family actually keeps.

Roughly one third of each volume is visual: photographs, documents, maps, and the records themselves reproduced at a size where they can be read. The remaining two thirds is written narrative — the documented history, with the evidence woven through it rather than exiled to an appendix.

What goes in

  • The documented line, generation by generation, with every claim sourced
  • Photographs from the family's own holdings, reproduced and captioned
  • Historical context for the places and years involved — what a neighborhood was, what an occupation meant, why a family moved when it did
  • Oral testimony, clearly marked as testimony and never as record
  • Full citations, and the research log

The distinction that matters

Family memory and documentary record are set apart on the page, always. Where they agree, that is worth saying. Where they conflict, both are given, and the reasoning that favors one is written out.

A book that quietly smooths over a contradiction is less valuable to a grandchild than one that shows the seam.

The seam. Memory and record run as separate streams and are joined only where the evidence joins them. Where they conflict the link is drawn broken, with both ends kept — the contradiction is the finding, not a defect to be smoothed.

Binding and materials

Volumes are printed and bound for longevity — archival stock, sewn binding, and materials chosen to survive being handled. Specifications are agreed before production and confirmed in writing.

Digitizing and organizing what you already have

Most of what goes into a book arrives as a box, a drawer and a hard drive nobody has opened in years. Sorting that out is work in its own right, and it can be commissioned alongside any report or book.

Digitization process includes secure custody transfer. Using a secure process and custody transfer, your items travel by insured carrier against a signed photographic inventory which is taken before anything is packed. Everything comes home afterwards, together with the digitized files made from it.

  • Fragile items are assessed before they are handled — brittle newsprint, flaking tintypes, photographs stuck to album pages. Anything unlikely to survive the process is returned undigitized, and you are told before it is touched.
  • Archival masters and everyday copies. TIFF masters for keeping, JPEGs for sending to relatives, all named to one scheme so a file tells you what it is.
  • Organized, not just scanned. Files are arranged by family, person and record type, with an index, and delivered to a secure download area that is yours alone and stays open for ninety days.
  • Digitizing is not restoration. Retouching, repair and reconstruction are separate work, quoted separately — they are offered, not assumed.

Milestone

Books built from living memory — an engagement, a wedding, an anniversary, a life still being lived.

Two Milestone books stacked on a wood table. The top volume is black cloth, blocked in white and gold with sparkler numerals reading 2018 and the words Celebrate, New Years Eve, Chicago. Beneath it a pale grey volume is blind-blocked New Years Eve 2019, Chicago.
Two volumes from the same family, one year apart.

The Milestone line is a different object from the genealogy work, and it makes different claims.

A Milestone book is built from interviews and photographs rather than from archival research. It records what people say about their own lives, in their own words, alongside the pictures they chose. It is testimony, gathered carefully and attributed precisely — who said it, when, and to whom.

Three levels

One ladder serves every occasion — a wedding, a baby, an adoption, an anniversary, a milestone birthday, a memorial. Only the questions change between them. The line starts at $2,500, and each level is quoted on its own scope.

Level one Keepsake

One subject, one occasion. The smallest complete book — two interview sessions, a follow-up round, and up to five documents checked against what was said.

About 36 pages · 24 photographs · 2 people interviewed · quality hardcover

Choose this if the occasion is close and the story belongs to one person.

Level two · most chosen Legacy

The full subject, properly heard. Four sessions across up to four people, so the account is corroborated rather than single-sourced, with a life timeline.

About 60 pages · 40 photographs · up to 4 interviewed · cloth, foil, slipcase

Choose this if more than one person holds part of the story, or the subject is a couple.

Level three Heirloom Edition

Two generations, in their own words. Seven sessions reaching back past the subject, two follow-up rounds, up to twenty documents verified.

About 100 pages · 70 photographs · up to 8 interviewed · leather, presentation box

Choose this if the people who remember the generation before are still here to be asked. That window is why this level exists.

Every level carries the same three commitments: every person is interviewed alone at least once, because a joint session is one account in two voices; every session ends with the same question — what have I not asked about?; and a frail informant is scheduled first, ahead of whoever is paying for the book.

Three generations of a family sitting together on and around a sofa in a living room, turned toward an elderly woman in the center who is talking with her hands raised. An open photograph album rests on her lap. Cups of tea sit on the low table in front of them.
The room a Milestone book is made in — an album open, and somebody explaining it while there is still time to ask.

How it is made

Interviews are conducted and recorded, then transcribed. Testimony is attributed to a named speaker and dated. Where two people remember an event differently, both accounts appear; the book does not adjudicate between them.

Two accounts of one afternoon. Both appear, each attributed to a named speaker and dated; neither is adjudicated. Illustrative — the speakers are not clients.

Photographs are supplied by the family and reproduced with care. Rights and permissions are cleared in writing before anything is printed, including for photographs taken by third parties.

What it is not

This line does not perform archival genealogical research and does not claim to. It is not conducted to the Genealogical Proof Standard, and it does not present its contents as documented findings. It is a record of what was said and what was kept, made well.

If what you want is the documented line behind the family, that is the genealogy work, and the two can be commissioned together.

The shoebox and the failing drive

Almost every Milestone commission starts the same way: a shoebox, three albums, and photographs on a phone and an old laptop that nobody has backed up. Getting all of it into one place, safely, is available as part of the commission.

We can coordinate local scanning services; or items can travel by insured carrier against a signed photographic inventory made before anything is packed. You receive archival masters for keeping and ordinary JPEGs for sending round the family, arranged by person and occasion with an index, on a secure download area of your own. Fragile material is assessed first, and anything unlikely to survive handling is returned untouched with an explanation. Originals always come home.

Repair and retouching are separate work — offered, and quoted on what the photograph actually needs.

About

Born and raised in Chicago, in a family that has had roots here since 1866 — and fortunately a family that kept its photographs and records.

Patty Anderson, photographed outdoors in three-quarter view against water and a hillside, wearing a dark jacket over a checked shirt. The image is printed in a single warm tone rather than full color.
Patty Anderson, Chicago.

Both sides of our family came from Germany, Sweden, Iceland and Lithuania. Two of my mother's ancestral families immigrated from Germany and had been living in Chicago since 1866 and 1868 — so they were already here when the city burned in 1871. Which means the records I work in professionally are the same ones I grew up inside, and so are the gaps. My father's side took the longer road once in America: through Michigan and Philadelphia in the 1850s, and Chicago only in late 1910.

I have been fortunate in a way most families are not. Both of my parents inherited photographs, records, family memorabilia, some dating to the early 1860s, and in a great many cases somebody wrote a name on the back. That is rarer than it sounds. Most boxes hold faces nobody can identify any more.

So I have spent years doing the thing those unknown photographs ask for: connecting them to the record. Birth, marriage, immigration, death — finding the documents that turn a face and a penciled name into a person with a life you can follow. My own family, friends' families, and a particular preoccupation with the ones nobody can put a name to. The faces that came down with nothing written on the back. The houses no one recognizes. The photograph that has to be from a particular decade because of a collar, or a doorway, or a street that was renumbered in 1909.

That is the part I love — digging until there is enough to tell somebody's story properly, and saying plainly where the evidence runs out.

Saltprint exists to do that work for other families. Yours has its own box, its own unexplained handwriting, its own people nobody has been able to place. I would very much like to help you find out who they were.

Start a conversation · Questions

Why the practice is called Saltprint

An uncut sheet of twenty-three small oval photographs of Abraham Lincoln, beardless, all printed from the same negative in warm brown on cream paper. They sit in five rows of four with three more below. A line of tiny printed text runs under each oval. The lower left corner of the sheet has been cut away where prints were removed.
Twenty-three salt prints of Lincoln on one uncut sheet, each about an inch tall, from Alexander Hesler's negative of 3 June 1860. His imprint is printed below every oval. The corner is gone where prints were cut out and taken.Wikimedia Commons, from wordcraft.net. Public domain — the work dates from 1860 and Hesler died in 1895.

The name takes one sentence to explain, and it is worth the sentence.

A salt print is the oldest kind of paper photograph: plain paper coated in salt and silver, printed by the sun. It was the medium of Alexander Hesler, the finest photographer working in Chicago in the 1850s, who made thousands of salt prints of Abraham Lincoln for the 1860 campaign.

Almost nothing of Chicago's photographic record from those years survived the fire of 1871. What did survive, survived because a family kept it — in an album, a drawer, a box nobody threw out. That is where this work begins. We find what was kept, establish what it actually proves, and bind it into a volume built to outlast the people who commissioned it.

The process itself is a fair description of the practice. A salt print is slow, made by exposure rather than development, and it cannot be rushed without failing. It also lasts — properly made and properly stored, longer than most of what replaced it.

It is not a coincidental name. A practice that began in a box of photographs nobody could identify was never going to be called anything else.

Questions

What the work costs, how long it takes, what happens when the record disagrees with the family, and what cannot be promised.

Click on any of the questions to read the answer.

Every project begins with a baseline consultation to review your existing records, define a clear target line, and make sure the foundational research meets the Genealogical Proof Standard. From there we help you choose the level that fits — starting with a Level 1 research report that breaks through a wall, or answers a question that will direct research you are conducting yourself, or moving to Levels 2 through 5 to preserve your lineage across generations in a custom heirloom book.

If you go on to commission a book within six months of your report's delivery, in full, the report fee comes off the price.

Because depth is fixed and width is what you choose. Every book reaches the great-great-grandparent generation — for most American families that lands somewhere between 1800 and 1860, which is where the records begin to thin and research slows considerably.

Holding every level to the same depth is what makes a fixed price possible instead of an open-ended one. A book that promises to go “as far back as possible” cannot be quoted at a fixed price.

If you want one particular line traced further — to the ancestor who crossed the ocean, to a soldier, to a colonial founder — that is a Deep Line Extension, available at every book level and quoted separately.

Sixteen is a ceiling, not a promise. Adoption, unknown parentage, destroyed records and the 1871 fire mean some lines cannot be traced at any budget.

Your book states which of your sixteen were reached, which were not, and why. That is a finding, not a failure, and it is written into the volume rather than left out of it.

Level 1 reports are a fixed fee, set by which report you commission. Books start at $4,750 for the Couple Study and rise with width. Milestone books start at $2,500.

Every book is quoted on its own scope. You receive a fixed figure in writing before anything is signed — not an estimate, not a range. What moves the number is how many lines you want covered and how cooperative the records turn out to be.

Reports run four to seven weeks. Books run from about two and a half months for a Couple Study to six months and beyond for the Comprehensive Saga.

Those windows are properties of the work, not of how busy the studio is. Rush is possible by written agreement and carries a premium.

Half on signing, and the balance staged against the work. Smaller commissions are half on signing and half on completion; the larger books add payments at the midpoint and, at the top level, at scope and outline.

Research expenses — certificates, repository copies, archive fees — are pre-approved above a threshold set in your agreement, billed at cost, with no markup.

You are told, and you are shown why.

Where two sources disagree, both appear in the report or book, along with the reasoning that favors one. Where the family account cannot be supported, it is recorded as what it is — an account, reported and not adopted. Nothing is quietly smoothed over. A book that hides a contradiction is worth less to a grandchild than one that shows it.

Family history turns up illegitimacy, bigamy, institutionalization, crime, slaveholding, and children who did not survive. It is better to decide in advance how you want such findings handled than to meet them in a draft.

That conversation happens before research begins, and what you decide is written into the agreement.

There is a DNA report at Level 1 for making sense of AncestryDNA results, and a DNA add-on available with the two largest books.

There are firm limits, stated up front: no haplogroups from AncestryDNA data, no segment analysis without a separate upload, no health or trait interpretation of any kind, and no percentage presented as more precise than it actually is.

Living people are handled carefully and are not written about without consent. Your agreement sets out what you are warranting on that point, and it is worth reading rather than skimming.

Photographs of living people never appear in marketing material. Consent to appear in a private book is not consent to appear on a website, and the two are asked for separately.

They make different claims, and that is the whole reason they are separate.

Genealogy is research-led. It works from records, it is conducted to the Genealogical Proof Standard, and every conclusion is cited.

Milestone is testimony-led. It is built from interviews and the photographs a family chose, attributed to a named speaker and dated. It does not perform archival research and does not claim to. It is a record of what was said and what was kept.

The two can be commissioned together, and often should be.

Yes. Every volume is structured so that later findings can be added as a supplement without reprinting the whole book, and the levels are built to stack — the unit you add is a family line.

Further work is a short schedule added to the same agreement, not a new contract.

You own the volume and the research findings within it. The full position on copyright and on the reproductions in the book is in the Terms & Conditions, which are attached to every agreement and are yours to read before you sign.

That a particular ancestor will be found. That a family story will turn out to be true. That a brick wall will come down — some of them are brick walls because the records burned.

What is promised is that the search will be reasonably exhaustive, that the reasoning will be written out, and that you will be told plainly where the evidence stopped.

Yes. It is available alongside any report or book, in either service line, and for many families it is the part that makes everything else possible.

Digitization process includes secure custody transfer. Your items travel by insured carrier against a signed photographic inventory made before anything is packed — so both of us know exactly what was sent, in what condition. Originals are returned together with the files made from them.

Fragile things are assessed before they are handled. Brittle newsprint, flaking tintypes, photographs stuck fast to album pages. Anything unlikely to survive the process is returned undigitized and you are told first, rather than after.

And organized, not merely scanned. Files are arranged by family, person and record type, indexed, and delivered to a secure download area that is yours alone and stays open for ninety days, so you can pull everything down at your own pace.

Restoration — retouching, repairing damage, rebuilding a torn corner — is separate work, quoted on what the photograph actually needs.

Above the federal standard. Documents and prints at 600 dpi, anything smaller than four by five inches at 1200, 35mm negatives and slides at 2400 — against the FADGI benchmark of 400 ppi used by the Library of Congress and the National Archives.

You receive archival TIFF masters to keep and ordinary JPEGs to send around the family, named to one scheme so a filename tells you what the file is. Infrared dust and scratch removal is applied to color film and slides where it improves the result, and deliberately not to black-and-white silver negatives or Kodachrome, where the process is ineffective or does harm.

Not answered here? Ask. The first conversation is free, and there is no obligation on either side.

Contact

Every commission starts with a conversation about what you already have and what you want to know.

Write to hello@saltprintchicago.com, or use the form below.

A one-line email is a perfectly good place to start. None of the fields are required.

Useful things to include, though none are required to start:

  • What you are hoping to find out, in whatever form the question currently takes
  • Which family lines, and roughly which places and years
  • What you already hold — photographs, certificates, an existing tree, a family account someone wrote down
  • Whether you are thinking of a report or a book

What happens next

A conversation, free, about thirty minutes. You describe what you have and what you want to know. I ask a few questions, then tell you plainly how I would go about it — which sometimes means a report before a book, and sometimes means waiting until more of the family material is in your hands.

Then a written scope and a figure. Exactly which lines are covered, what you receive, the price, the timeline, and what is excluded. Nothing is estimated at this stage — the number is the number, and it is fixed before anything is signed.

Then one agreement, signed once. Work begins on the signed agreement, the deposit, and the receipt of the family material already in your hands.

Before you write

Nothing below is required, and a one-line email is a perfectly good place to start.

It is worth knowing that research expenses — certificates, repository copies, archive fees — are billed at cost with no markup, and pre-approved above a threshold set in your agreement. And that difficult findings are a conversation held before research begins, not after: family history turns up illegitimacy, institutionalization, crime and children who did not survive, and it is better to decide in advance how you want that handled.

Questions answers most of the rest.

Reflections

What clients have said about the work, in their own words.

We truly appreciated learning your family histories, stories, and special moments. If you have worked with Saltprint and would be willing to share your experience, it would be gratefully received.

Share a testimonial

How would you like to be credited?

Client login

Your interactive ancestor chart, your delivered files, and the current state of the work.

Access is set up when your agreement is signed, for the people you named on your intake form — up to three. To add or remove someone, write to me and I will change it.

There is no password. Enter the email address on your agreement and a six-digit code is sent to it. The code signs you in for the session.

Sign-in is handled by Cloudflare, so no password is stored here or anywhere else. You will see their verification step, then come straight back.

Continue to sign in

If the code does not arrive within a minute or two, check the junk folder. Some company mail filters hold messages from noreply@notify.cloudflare.com.
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The Eichenold commission

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Level 3 · The Targeted Book
Stage Midpoint narrative review
With you for review Chapters 1–3, until 12 Sep

Your ancestor chart

Live as the research goes in. Every person on it links to the records behind them, and a line drawn broken is a link the evidence does not yet carry.

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Your ancestor chart

Your files

Item Added
Draft chapters 1–329 Aug 2026Download
Research log, to date29 Aug 2026Download
Source scans — Rauenthal and Aschaffenburg registers14 Aug 2026Download
Your digitized photographs — 214 items2 Aug 2026Download
Signed agreement and scope schedule11 Jun 2026Download

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