Your data should belong to you.
Darwin Data is a personal project built on a simple idea: the record of your life, and your family's, should be yours to keep. Most of us hand that record to someone else's servers without thinking about it. I'm building the opposite: a private system I actually own, where my own data and generations of family history live together, organized and preserved on my terms instead of a company's.
It started in 2024 as a way to make sense of my own life and my family's past. It's grown into something more.
About
I'm Erik FitzGerald, a combat veteran, a father, and a project management student at Northeastern University. I spent nearly a decade in operations, facilities, and program management, including a program management role at Cushman & Wakefield running a 43-location account, and before that eleven years in the Massachusetts Army National Guard, with a deployment to Afghanistan in 2010. I know how to manage complexity, handle difficult stakeholders, and keep things running when the structure around me is imperfect.
I'm not the most credentialed person in any room I walk into. I'm the person who does the work anyway, and builds things worth building. Darwin Data is that instinct turned toward the most personal data there is: my own, and my family's. Part of it is a multi-generational family research initiative grounded in Bowen Family Systems Theory, currently running as live coursework in my program with faculty involvement.
Collaboration
I'm looking to connect with people whose work touches personal or family data in any serious way: genealogy, analytics and data science, the social sciences, history, archival and library science, and anywhere nearby. I'm building this seriously, and I learn fastest from people who know their field. If something I'm doing intersects with your work, I'd like to hear from you.
© 2026 Darwin Data · an independent, private endeavor