Keepstra helps recover missing names, silenced women, and fractured family lines through archival research and intuitive memory work.
I help people trace what’s been left behind.
That might be land.
A name.
A broken paper trail.
A question that still hums under skin and bone.
I don’t advertise.
I don’t automate.
I don’t pretend this is fast.
But if you’re holding a story that feels incomplete: a plot of land, a whispered name, or a mother who wasn’t counted, you’re in the right place.
Keepstra is a living archive and memory practice rooted in historical research, intuitive recognition, and reverence for what survives. I work with people tracing the lives that history nearly erased – forgotten women, fractured migrations, ancestral lines lost to silence or circumstance.
Some of what I do is grounded in data: land records, migration maps, marriage rolls. Some of it emerges through quiet pattern recognition – what was skipped, whispered, left behind. It’s a slower kind of work. One that trusts memory to surface on its own terms.
What I Offer
Keepstra isn’t a database or a plug-and-play service. It’s a practice — and sometimes, a collaboration.
Land & Property History
I work with deeds, tax rolls, plat maps, and county land transfers to reconstruct ownership lines.
If you want to know who your land once belonged to—or why a house disappeared—I can help follow the trail.
Ancestral Lineage & Family Research
I trace family names through records that aren’t always digital.
Marriages, migrations, baptisms, deaths.
I specialize in following lines that dropped off the page.
Cemetery & Burial Records
I locate graves that don’t have stones.
I map names to cemeteries and plot layouts, and confirm burials lost to time.
Sometimes I find them in a register.
Sometimes I just know where to look.
Forgotten Women
She wasn’t in the will.
She wasn’t on the census.
But she was there.
I pay attention to the women who aren’t named and the places they still shape.
Document Correlation & Pattern Work
Sometimes the truth is in what doesn’t line up.
I compare files, year over year, slip by slip, to find the holes, the folds, the edits.
This isn’t psychic work.
But I can feel when something’s missing.
And I’ve learned to listen to that.
I take on a limited number of projects, with the understanding that this work can’t be rushed. If services are currently closed, you’re still welcome to begin elsewhere on the site.
Ways to Begin
Even if you’re not ready for a full project, there are ways to step into the work:
Browse the Memory Shelf
A curated selection of books and research tools I return to often, especially when the path grows unclear.
Download the Starter Kit
A quiet guide for gathering early memory fragments — names, places, family lore — especially helpful if you’re returning to a lineage after time away.
Read the Journal
Essays, field notes, and stories about the process of remembering and researching.
Visit Echoes
A visual collection of unlabeled photos, marginalia, and partial records. These pieces remain unresolved — but not dismissed.
Keepstra exists to trace what remains.
Not all lives were written down.
Some were erased.
Some were carried in objects, in land, in names whispered only once.
If you’re carrying a question, a document, a memory, a surname that never sat right,
you’re in the right place.
This isn’t traditional genealogy.
It’s part research, part intuition, wholly human.