After doing many months of our own researching between 2017 and 2018, I found I was getting nowhere. I contacted My Danish Roots who I am sure provided many more hours of research than I paid for but, without a birth name and a more precise area of Denmark to search records in, again we were disappointed.

Working with professionals helped me to look at my problem with fresh eyes. We looked at Robert and Maria Smith’s children’s names to see if they had followed the traditional naming pattern to find some names we could search for.

My Danish Roots genealogists had to tailor a research program just for us, and even though we didn’t find out exactly who Robert Smith really was, they gave us some possible names that have, in later research come up again in our family story.