About Me

My name is Alanna Loucks, and I am the founder of Past Connections Historical Consulting. I grew up in the east end of Toronto, surrounded by a love of heritage, history, and city-building.  Throughout my experience at university, my love of history continued to grow, and my desire to uncover and emphasize the role of diverse individuals, households, and communities in the growth of what have become major cities was the central thrust behind my approach to this research.

During my Master of Arts and PhD projects, I followed the diverse members of different kinds of households in seventeenth and eighteenth century Montréal to trace and reconstruct the dense networks that knit together Montréal and reveal the ways that diverse peoples built this urban centre. This desire to uncover and recentre individual interest, experience, interaction, and action in historical narratives, events, and spaces continues to influence the guiding methodology that I bring to all research questions, which brings together genealogy, network analysis, and historical research, to deepen and enhance what we know about the past and its expected and unexpected influences on the present. The little details, echoes of different voices, and seemingly mundane specifics of everyday interactions, or the passing mention of a moment, have a lot more to tell us.

All we have to do is listen.