Who am I?

My name is Margaret K. Smith and I'm a wife, mom and daughter. I have been interested in my family and researching my roots as long as I can remember. I can thank my parents for this-they did research as well. I started researching in earnest while I was in college where I took several genealogy courses offered throught the history department.  It soon became my much loved hobby.

Since that time, I have been a Family History Consultant and Secretary of the Utah County chapter of the Utah Genealogical Association. I enjoy teaching how to do genealogy, especially Native American. I have also been published in the International Genealogical Journal.

In 2001, I decided to pursue genealogy and family history as my career. I became a Certified Genealogist in November 2004. I chose to become certified because I felt I owed my clients a certain level of professionalism and had seen too many genealogies and family histories which were lacking in documentation or sources, made too many assumptions of familial relationships and were written poorly. The advent of the internet has only increased the number of these types of genealogies.

I graduated from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah with a Bachelor of Arts in 1991 and have continued to take independent study courses in family history and have attended Federation of Genealogical Societies, Brigham Young University, Association of Professional Genealogists and Utah Genealogial Association conferences.

My own family is a mix like most Americans. To mention a few, I have great-grandparents who came through Ellis Islands, Palantine immigrants who settled in the Carolinas, Irish who came over near the end of the Potato Famine, and my fifth great-grandmother was an Arapaho.