I spent six years helping people find their ancestors. Then I realized that wasn't the problem.
My name is Denyse Allen. I'm a Pennsylvania genealogist, published author, podcaster, and the founder of Chronicle Makers.
For six years I worked as a professional genealogist, specializing in Pennsylvania research — one of the hardest states in the country. Twenty-five different religious groups. Constantly shifting county boundaries. Records scattered across 800 archives. If you can research Pennsylvania ancestors, you can research anyone's.
I was good at finding things. My clients got thorough research reports with proper citations, evidence analysis, the works.
But here's what I kept noticing: the reports went into a drawer. The stories never got written. My clients didn’t know how to share professional reports with their family.
The problem was families wanted stories, and nobody had taught my clients (or me!) how to turn a research report into a story. And the genealogy world — societies, conferences, platforms, software — wasn't going to fix that. The entire industry is built on research research research. Nobody profits when you finish.
So I built the thing that didn't exist.
Chronicle Makers started as a simple question
What would it actually take to help someone go from "I have decades of research" to "I finished a stories my family can read"?
The answer turned out to be three things: a structured process, the right AI tools used in the right way, and a community of people working toward the same goal. Not more research. Not more subscriptions. Structure, tools, and accountability.
The 10-Day Chronicle Writing Sprint came from that question. It has a 90% completion rate — not because the work is easy, but because the structure removes every excuse to stop.
Why Pennsylvania made me a better teacher
Pennsylvania is where genealogists go to get humbled. The jurisdictional complexity, the language barriers, the record gaps — it's genuinely hard. Working through that hard thing taught me something: if you have a systematic method, it works everywhere. Pennsylvania research techniques transfer directly to researching ancestors in any American state.
That's why I use Pennsylvania as the proving ground for everything I teach. If a research technique works there, it works other places too.
I've published two books on Pennsylvania research: Pennsylvania Vital Records Research (2022) and Archives in Pennsylvania for Genealogy Research (2023). My podcast, Your Pennsylvania Ancestors, reaches 4,000+ listeners every year.
On AI and family history
I started teaching AI for genealogy during a window when most of the genealogy world was either ignoring it or panicking about it. I was neither. I saw what it could actually do: remove the friction between having research and writing a story.
AI doesn't replace your work. It doesn't write your ancestor's story for you in any meaningful sense. What it does is handle the parts that create stuckness — the blank page, the organizational overwhelm, the "I don't know how to start" paralysis. Your personal choices, your family knowledge, your instinct for what matters are built into the AI workflows I teach.
There's a best way to use these tools for this work, and I've spent thousands of hours figuring out what that is.
What I believe
Family historians don't have a research problem. They have a finishing problem. The genealogy industry created that problem and profits from it. Chronicle Makers exists to solve it.
Your ancestors lived full, complicated, human lives. They deserve more than a database entry. And your family — the ones who are here now and the ones who come after — deserve to know who came before them.
Chronicle making is about completion and courage.
We research. We write. We publish. We don't gatekeep and we don't chase credentials.
America's 250th anniversary is July 4, 2026. That's the deadline I've anchored this work to, and it's real. Your family's founding stories — whoever your founders were, whenever they arrived — are part of America's story. This is the moment to write them.
Find me here
Chronicle Makers community on Skool →