Susan Oliver
For as long as I can remember, I have always been fascinated with people’s life stories. Starting from an early age, the books I chose to read were mostly biographies with a few mysteries thrown in. Analyzing and solving puzzles has also been a lifelong hobby.
My Expertise
In college, my studies primarily revolved around the brain. I received a B.A. in pre-clinical biology major with psychology and chemistry minors.
Later, I went on to earn my M.S. in Experimental Psychology. The careers that followed were in the areas of traumatic brain injury, clinical psychiatry research, and market research, with my primary roles being in neuropsychological testing and data analysis at a Harvard Clinical Research Lab and the University of Iowa. Through the years, it became apparent that I was still just as interested in learning about people’s life stories as much as I was in clinical research.
While raising my kids, I wanted to continue to keep my research skills sharp and found Ancestry.com as they were starting online. Since I did not know much information past my own grandparents, I figured I would sign up for a free 2-week trial, find all my family information, and be done. In two weeks, I was hooked! Now, over twenty years have passed, and I continue to find fascinating family information!
I have found the research skills I used in clinical psychiatry and market research to be very useful for genealogy research. Both require an eye for detail and the ability to work with large datasets and see the big picture while working quickly and accurately. Genealogy research also requires a certain tenacity and curiosity, as well as the ability to creatively think outside of the box to find connections that others may not see.
Several years ago, I began to incorporate DNA into my research as it became available. This personally came in very handy when I found a certain cluster of distant cousins in my matches that I could not explain and why another family line did not have any DNA matches. After many years of research, it appears that my great-grandmother married someone other than my biological great-grandfather! As it turns out, this family situation is not at all uncommon.
As I learned more about my own family tree, I wanted to use my experience and knowledge to help other people find their ancestors. For me, the most rewarding thing about genealogy research is to find information and photos of someone’s ancestor or relative they never met or knew.
One of the ways that I have worked to help others was to create several family pages on Facebook, which brought distant cousins together to meet and share family photos and information about shared ancestors.
Through the years, I have also helped adoptees find their biological parents through DNA research and building their family trees.
More recently, I assisted a court to find living relatives of a young child involved in a paternity case. In April 2022, I was fortunate enough to attend the I4GG Conference in San Diego hosted by CeCe Moore to learn more about Investigative Genetic Genealogy methods and techniques.
If you need assistance with any genealogy research, please feel free to contact me. I would love to help introduce you to your ancestors and their stories.
