When you think of a typical college student, you probably are not thinking of someone who spends their free time running a business that pursues a unique passion. Eric Schubert is that anomaly. Schubert is a sophomore at Elizabethtown College double majoring in political science and history. On top of a double major, Schubert runs ES Genealogy from his dorm room, helping his clients discover their pasts.
I just so happen to live right next door to Schubert. I heard in the second week of school that he somehow solves crimes, and I was intrigued. I saw him in the hall and asked him about it, only to find that it is a much broader set of skills that he possesses. The articles written of Schubert all said the same thing. They painted a picture of him as a child prodigy who started making his family tree when he was home sick one day in middle school, and now it had blossomed into something much bigger.
Genealogy is the science of piecing together people’s family trees to learn facts about their pasts. On Schubert’s website, esgenealogy.com, he provides four services for his clients. He can map out your family tree in a PDF document for you, help you learn more about a specific ancestor you may be curious about, help you learn more about a mystery in your DNA (if you were adopted, for example) or any other specific genealogy related questions you may have.
I asked Schubert to take me through his process. He said that most people do not know much about their family tree past their grandparents, and that some people do not even know their grandparents’ names. First, he tries to piece together whatever he can about his client’s family tree with the usually limited information that they give to him. From there, he builds the tree by sifting through basic records. Most of these are census records, which are very easy to find, especially if your family has been in America for a long time. Other records, like military or immigration records, can also come up, explaining things that these people could have done.
According to Schubert, the most difficult clients to find information about have ancestors who come from Eastern Europe, Italy and even Ireland, just due to records being hard to access. Schubert said that this can make some clients hard to work with.
“People expect me to be able to trace their ancestors to the 1400s in Italy, but no, that’s not going to happen,” Schubert said. “Even going to great grandparents in Italy, you might not be able to do that, but people think you can. A lot of it depends on circumstances.”
I asked Schubert if this is the same for people of Asian descent, but according to him, you will find “literally nothing.” You would think that putting together someone’s family tree would be a long process. However, Schubert said, “I could probably put yours together as a party trick in 10 minutes.”
Schubert finds that he is still able to keep his business running while remaining a committed student. His secret? Wise use of time.
“It’s mainly time management, if I wasn’t good with that, I wouldn’t be able to [do both at once],” Schubert said. “Going through my freshman year and high school, it taught me a lot about how to structure my schedule, how I can juggle 20 things at once and not feel stressed out about it.”
You would think that Schubert would have to tell his customers that he needs a little more time with his work due to school, but when I asked him if this was the case, I got a very definitive: “Never. I never tell them I need to back anything up, and I manage to get it all done in a certain timeframe that I set generally.”
Of course, someone who deals with a lot of people’s family trees has a lot of fascinating stories from these cases. In one instance, he found out that his client’s father was actually the local milk man. In another, he found that someone’s grandmother was born in the same village as Adolf Hitler, around the same time.
Schubert said that it is definitely helpful to have a general knowledge of history.
“It’s all about inferences and context clues,” Schubert said. “For example, 1918. You have a lot of clients who wonder why their ancestors drop off the map in 1918. You have to have a basic understanding of world events and think, ‘okay, what happened in 1918?’ The Spanish Flu was 1918. Do you know how many people were dying from the Spanish Flu and not even getting death certificates, their deaths weren’t even reported? It’s a lot of context clues like that.”
Telling people interesting facts about their family tree can lead to some bad news as well. I asked Schubert if it ever gets easier to tell people hard truths about themselves. He paused and thought hard before answering. Then, he said, “It got easier. It’s not that I got desensitized to it, but for me it’s kind of like… not every day work, but I have to roll out the same show. I like to say I’m part therapist. I’m used to it now, so it gets better.”
The first time he ever had to tell someone bad news about themselves, he had to tell someone that their father had killed their mother in a murder-suicide. He sees a lot of situations where people were conceived because of a rape. He even had a case where someone thought she knew who her father was based on her last name, but Schubert had the genetics, which told him who her real father was, but his client simply could not accept the truth.
“The genetics don’t lie. Her mother probably gave her the name of some high school boyfriend,” Schubert said. “Paperwork is fake, all the time. People will put the craziest things on birth certificates, adoption certificates, etc.”
Recently, Schubert’s work has grown to not be limited to just people’s ancestry. He is now also using his work in genealogy to solve crimes. He said it is the same sort of process for finding parents, but you have to find the murderer’s DNA and put it into different kinds of databases. For this, the police find the murderer’s DNA at the scene, they send it to a lab and the lab sends him a report. According to Schubert, “at this step, it’s not a lot of genetic work, it’s just a lot of knowing the case you’re doing.”
Again, he talks about using context clues, knowing how this suspect could be related to the person who was murdered. He described an instance where the lab sent him a report of a man who they thought might have been the murderer, but he lived several states away. Schubert found that the suspect just happened to live in the same county of the victim’s alma mater. He then humbled himself a bit, joking to me, “I say it’s simple, but in reality, I have 5 or 6 cases that I haven’t solved yet. But I do have one!”
When asked if he thought genealogy would take him this far, his eyes widened and he said, “Oh God, no.” He says that he thinks he is going to start scaling it back eventually. Referring to the news reports, he said, “The whole thing has been how young I am, and I’m going to be 20 in six months. I don’t want to fade away, but I do want one last pop and then I’ll be done,” he explained.
I asked him if it was fulfilling to know that his work means a lot to his clients, and he said, “For me, it is a lot of a routine, but it is nice to have a wake-up call sometimes and know how many people’s lives I have literally changed when I was just 15. I don’t think about it a lot, but when they do, I think, wow, you’re right. That really is nice. Getting update emails from people really helps me appreciate it.”
Whether or not Schubert decides to continue his hobby-turned-business, he has touched hundreds of people’s lives and done a valuable service in helping them find out more about their own family histories.
