Day Three: It's Done. Here's Your First Brick Wall Biography
From vague uncertainty to specific next steps in three days
A mere three days ago, I started writing the world’s first Brick Wall Biography. Today, it’s finished.
17,000+ words reconstructing Marena Borowski’s life from fragments. Birth in 1870s Galicia to death in 1942 Canada. Every claim transparently marked as documented fact, reasonable inference, or educated speculation.
You can download it now.
What’s Inside
Part I: The Foundation - The documentary record. Census entries, family tree data, vital records. Everything I can actually prove.
Part II: The Orbit - Deep historical research about the world Marena inhabited. Galician peasant economics, Greek Catholic practices, immigration patterns, prairie settlement. This stays valuable even if biographical details get revised.
Part III: The Hypothesis - The complete life story using signal phrases to mark certainty levels. “The census confirms...” versus “Given typical patterns...” versus “It is plausible to imagine...”
Part IV: The Research Ledger - This is the real deliverable. Every stress point, every contradiction, every gap discovered during writing. Plus specific, actionable next steps with exact search parameters.
The Discovery
Here’s what I didn’t expect: the biggest gap isn’t where I thought it was.
I thought the brick wall was “I can’t find her parents.”
The actual brick wall is “I haven’t verified this is even her correct name.”
During writing, I discovered I’d been examining the wrong census schedule. I currently have NO primary source confirming her given name, birth year, maiden name, or birthplace.
This isn’t methodology failure. It’s the methodology working.
Writing the full narrative forced me to confront what I actually know versus what I’ve been assuming. If I’d commissioned expensive Ukrainian archive searches first, I might have been pursuing the wrong family line entirely.
The Brick Wall Biography caught that before investment.
Download It
The complete biography, Between Empires - A Brick Wall Biography of Marena Borowski is available now.
Released under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. Share freely. Use it to understand the methodology. Apply it to your own brick walls.
What Happens Next
The Research Ledger gives me a clear first step: verify her identity using the 1901 Census Schedule 1 (Population). Depending on how much client work I have, I may be searching this week.
If the census confirms “Marena/Mary Dereniuk,” the biography stands. If it shows a different name, I revise and redirect. Either way, the brick wall is now a doorway with specific steps through it.
More Brick Wall Biographies Are Coming
Marena was the proof of concept. I’ll be testing the methodology on other ancestors with different documentation challenges. Each one will refine the approach and reveal what works best.
Want Your Own?
If you have an ancestor stuck behind a genealogical dead end, I can help. Learn more about the Brick Wall Biography service or book a free Brick Wall Audit to see if this methodology can bring new clarity to your research.