About Misti

Just a small-town girl living in a big world.

I have always loved history. Family history though was something “grandma does”, not me. While some teen girls were reading romance novels, I was reading true-life crime books and magazines like Time and Newsweek. Yea, I’m “that” nerd. I’m also very nosey.

I have walked the streets of New York, Pompeii, Troy, Cairo, Istanbul, London, Rome, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Moscow and more amazed by cities created by all those who came before me.

I have spent hours amongst the rows of items in The Metropolitan Museum, The Louvre, The Uffizi, The Hermitage, The Hagia Sophia, The WWII Museum and so many more because how people lived before me, fascinates me. (Remember, very nosey.)

Yet in all my travels and books and films, I was never interested in MY family history. Until that one fateful day I was bored and waiting for my friend to return home from work while I was visiting.

Et voila, here I am today.

I grew up in a small Michigan town in a farming community built by Germans and even for Germans. We ate German-ish food passed down from previous generations and had German customs and had German names. I was German descended, period.

I was not though, but actually a whole lot more. As I waited for my friend, I played on Ancestry and added name after name to my tree. That was a very long time ago and I am STILL working on that tree, but I learned, it never ends, and I am more than “just German”.

I realized that the streets I had walked around the world and the museums that held the goods of peoples from long ago were also a part of me and the history of me. I was bigger than that little girl on that farm in small town Michigan.

After doing my family research on Ancestry, I discovered I had relatives whose belongings were in museums. I had relatives who helped build the ancient streets I had walked and I had relatives who fought for land (in good and bad ways) and freedom and justice and fled to faraway lands in search of a new life. I had relatives whose names I had read in books out of just an interest in that particular moment in history.

Family History becomes more than a hobby.

You never know what you may find in your ancestry and there may or may not be any rich and famous kin. There may be nefarious kin. But one of the most precious pieces of history in MY life is seeing the signature of a relative on their naturalization papers and being able to buy the book my ancestor wrote in the 1700s as a well-regarded professor in Germany.

It starts with a leaf, your leaf. It branches out into a tree of faces, stories, documents, experiences, places, history, dreams, sadness, happiness and more of the people that all led to you.

This is why I love genealogy and started a career in it. I’m so excited to help you experience your story and the story of your people. Photography is an integral part of my life and it’s important in genealogy too. Bringing both passions together is a great gift.

I completed two years of study in genealogy this year and have the title PLCGS now. I look forward to helping others come face to face with their past too.

Misti Reif, PLCGS

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