Our story
We started EasyGenie in 2016 with a passion for genealogy. Since then, EasyGenie genealogy charts and forms have helped tens of thousands of genealogists organize, store, and share family research. We have grown a lot since those early days. Founder Ian Lamont and wife Nicole are now based in an office on the historic Commonwealth Avenue just outside of Boston.
EasyGenie's origin story
In 2016, we launched our first starter genealogy kit printed on acid-free paper, as a complement to the genealogy guide we had published the previous year (the award-winning Genealogy Basics In 30 Minutes by professional genealogist Shannon Combs-Bennett).
But the more we think about it, the more we realize EasyGenie's origin story goes back much further.
Between 1982 and 1985, Ian's mother had the foresight to make three audio recordings with her father, a U.S. Navy veteran of WWI and WWII. He shared his life story on those tapes, from growing up in northern New York, surviving the Great Depression, his military service, and settling down after WWII to raise a family.
In the late 90s, after his grandfather had passed, Ian found the cassettes in a drawer. What an important record! He made digital copies of the audio and transcribed parts of the interview before the audio tape faded away.
Later, Ian discovered another family history project carried out by a cousin. The cousin encouraged his aunt to share what she knew about her family's origins. The cousin gave her a small cassette recorder but she didn't like that (technology was frustrating then, too) and switched to the medium she knew best - longhand! She wrote out a beautiful account of her parents and grandparents, including desperately poor people who had emigrated from Europe under very difficult conditions. The cousin's wife typed it all out and eventually a copy of this account came into Ian's hands.
As Ian conducted additional research, more of these scraps and reminisces surfaced. Many of them were written on paper, such as the fragile handwritten family tree drawn by his great-grandmother in the early 1930s.
Some of them were in person, including interviews with cousins, aunts, and great-aunts on both sides of Ian's family before they passed, as well as an interview with Nicole's father, a quiet veteran of WWII and a civil war in his own country.
It dawned on us that what our families have been doing for close to 100 years - preserving stories and research for future generations - is in fact the origin story of EasyGenie. We want to give you even better tools to preserve and share your research. Our core products are high-quality paper forms printed on acid-free paper, but we offer other tools such as archival-quality pens for genealogy.
Hundreds of years from now, long after we are gone and our Ancestry subscriptions have lapsed, these paper forms may still be with our descendants, helping to preserve our stories for them and the generations that follow.
Why EasyGenie?
EasyGenie's custom genealogy charts have clean designs and easy-to-read fonts, with lots of space to record genealogy data such as names, dates, immigration data, hometowns, citations, and other genealogy information.
Our acid-free paper forms are perfect for recording core data and research notes that you can refer to for years to come. You can also pass down the forms to the next generation, or share them with relatives and friends who do not have access to Ancestry.com or other types of genealogy apps, comfortable in the knowledge that the data on the acid-free paper forms will last for many decades if stored properly. Quoting the Library of Congress website, "good quality paper stored in good conditions (cooler temperatures; 30-40% relative humidity) are able to last a long time -- even hundreds of years."
Whether you're an amateur family history sleuth, a professional genealogist, or looking for a memorable genealogy gift, EasyGenie has you covered!
EasyGenie® paper and digital forms are published by i30 Media Corporation, a family-owned company based in New England and publisher of the award-winning Genealogy Basics In 30 Minutes. We make our products in the United States, using acid-free paper and high-quality offset and digital printers. Genealogy Endures™ with EasyGenie!
- Ian, Nicole, and the rest of the EasyGenie team!
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EasyGenie® is a registered trademark. All rights reserved.
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