About Rich Bianchi

A Personal Calling

From Personal Quest to Professional Practice

My great-great-grandfather Defendente Bianchi left Piemonte in the late nineteenth century and found his way to one of New York City's most celebrated addresses: the Hotel Astor on Times Square, where he worked as a cook. He married Alice Barrett, an Irish immigrant, and built a life that crossed two continents, two cultures, and two languages before it was fully settled. That story, a man from a northern Italian village standing in a Gilded Age hotel kitchen, far from everything he knew, is what first drew me into this work.

But genealogy has a way of leading you somewhere unexpected. Tracing a great-grandmother with the surname Vernon pulled me in an entirely different direction: back through English county records, into the medieval rolls, and eventually to a Norman family whose motto has been Vernon Semper Viret ("Vernon always flourishes") since they crossed the Channel with the Conqueror. The same discipline that finds an immigrant's ship manifest can trace a lineage to a castle in Normandy. That range is what makes this work endlessly compelling.

Today I bring that curiosity and rigor to every client project. Whether you're searching for a great-grandparent who arrived at Ellis Island, trying to break through a brick wall that's stymied you for years, or building a comprehensive family tree from scratch, I approach every research task with the care it deserves.

"I don't just find names; I find people. There's a difference. Every name in a ledger was a person who laughed, struggled, loved, and left something behind. My job is to find what they left."

My research spans records held in repositories across the United States, Italy, Ireland, the British Isles, and beyond, and I'm continually expanding my access to emerging databases and digitized archive collections.

Work With Me