Ancestry Magazine

It is rare not to need help at some point in your family history research. Hiring a professional may be the solution.

So you’ve mined the Internet until the wee hours in the morning? You’ve climbed up and down the ladders at the county courthouse pulling down heavy, dusty volumes? You’ve spent summer vacations trekking through abandoned cemeteries full of weeds and snakes? You’ve riffled through all the family photographs and asked many questions of family members and you’re still not satisfied with your research findings?

It is rare not to need help at some point in your family history research. Hiring a professional may be the solution. Knowing when t o do so, how to prepare, what to provide the researcher, and what you can reasonably expect are key to making the venture a productive one. Following are a few tips to consider when hiring a professional researcher.

When Is It Time to Hire a Professional?
There are a number of circumstances that warrant hiring a professional. The most common is simply not being able to access records at a distant repository. Some researchers use professionals if they have a particularly complex problem they don’t have the time or expertise to solve. Other more experienced researchers may wish to have another person review their work and suggest research strategies. Finally, researchers may need help discovering living relatives, as in the case of adoptions and birth parent searches. However you arrive at your decision, it is important that you contact the right person at the right stage of your research and that you provide the information necessary to secure further family information.

What Can a Professional Do for Me?
Professional genealogists offer a variety of services. The most common are researching a family’s ancestry, tracing the family to an immigrant ancestor or country of origin, creating a lineage, and preparing papers for various society memberships. Some genealogists specialize in a particular geographic area, ethnic group, or time period. An experienced genealogist will be familiar with developing research strategies and evaluating records. Professionals can also help identify descendants if you are interested in writing a complete family history and want to include all family members of a particular ancestor. Family historians are often hired by legal firms or financial institutions to establish legal heirs to an estate. Professional genealogists may work independently or for a library or archive, a research company, or a legal firm or financial institution.

Whom Should I Hire?
While there have been efforts to require certification or licensure of genealogists, especially as it relates to privacy issues and access to modern records, there is currently no uniform law regarding licensing. As a result, professional researchers may acquire their credentials from one of several organizations. In addition to these credentialing agencies, you should consider other criteria as you make your hiring decision. Most genealogists are self-taught, and many competent professionals do not seek credentials. Years of education, research experience, interests, and satisfactory service to clients may be just as important as credentials.

Consult a listing for researchers in the area you are interested in and contact several of them (see page 53). Find out about their experience, their professional affiliations, and their ease of access to records. I f you have a special project in mind, ask about their experience in those specialty areas. When working with a research firm, ask for the credentials of the person who will actually be doing your work.

What About Fees?
Most professional researchers will ask for an initial retainer. Find out what their practice is regarding continuing research beyond the retainer. Be specific about how much research you authorize at the outset. It is unwise to allow a project unlimited research time unless you have unlimited funds to allocate to your project. Ask for interim reports that are billed to you at the time and then make your decision regarding future research as more information becomes available. Reputable researchers will get approval from you before doing additional research or incurring expenses on your behalf. Make sure you’re clear on that point before proceeding.

Most researchers charge by the hour and bill for out-of-pocket expenses such as copies, vital records fees, and travel. Hourly rates vary from $20 to $100 depending on qualifications, market conditions, etc. Ask what is and isn’t covered in the fee. Think about and com e to an agreement with your researcher about the following:

• Research parameters
• Payment terms
• Continuing research
• Publication rights to the research
• Content of reports
• Goals and priorities for research

There are things you can do to control or limit your costs, including gathering as much information as you can in a clear format. Be very clear in specifying the goal of the project and commission only one report at a time. Do your own work in the interim. Ask your researcher for advice on what you can do to partner with him or her in accomplishing the research.

What Should I Provide?
To ensure that the researcher does not duplicate the work you have already done, be sure to include as much of a summary report as possible along with a family group sheet, a lineage chart, and your research log. The log should list references searched along with what you found and did not find in the records. Providing copies of key source documents is always helpful. A documented chronology of the family and critical events is a valuable tool to identify gaps in research and where information simply doesn’t jive. Simply preparing the document may help you organize your thoughts and see where there are gaps in research.

Make sure you can provide evidence to support the facts you tell your researcher. Is this something that was told to you? Do you have definitive proof or is it a conclusion based on a number of pieces of information? Often the value in hiring a professional is having a fresh eye to question the results, see a missing clue, or find something that doesn’t quite fit.

What Can I Expect?
One of my favorite opening lines from potential clients goes something like this:

“I’ve relentlessly researched this family for the past thirty years and have had no luck finding my great-great-grandfather to date. Will you please go to the archives tomorrow and find him for me?”

Whi le every professional genealogist would love to rise to the challenge, they are not miracle workers. It is important to keep your research focused on a particular set of questions, to know what you want, and to communicate your priorities to your researcher. No researcher can guarantee that he or she can find your relative or can know how many hours it will take. If your researcher makes such promises, find another one. Each family history is unique and no reputable researcher guarantees results. You are paying for the researcher’s time and expertise, not results.

The key to working effectively with a professional researcher is to clearly define the goals of the project, to establish priorities, and to communicate what is known and not known, and most importantly, which records have been researched.

A good research plan typically begins with an overview of the research. The researcher will need to become familiar with your family, its names, and the research that has been done thus far, so the first few hours of a project can be taken up in just studying your documents. It is typically not worth anyone’s time to commission less than a day of research, unless you have a very time-limited project or simply need a record look-up.

Once complete, you can expect a documented and clearly written report summarizing what records were searched and what was found in each source, including sources where nothing was found. Recommendations for future research along with some analysis of the findings help solidify the thoughts of both you and the researcher to determine the next step. Reports should include research notes and identification of all sources searched with negative as well as positive results. Documentation of findings, such as copies of original documents and secondary materials, may also be included.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions and get clarification of any points you don’t understand or that seem inconsistent.

What Happens Next?
Be open to what your genealogist tells you. Try not to let your preconceptions about what the family was, where they were, etc., limit your thinking. A tragic example from my own experience was when a young woman asked me to locate her father shortly after the death of her mother. She had been told that her father abandoned the family when she was only two years old. After several months of painstaking research, I found a man whom I believed was her father. But he wasn’t living in the state that she thought he would be and he used a slightly different spelling of his surname. My client chose not to contact the man. Three years later, she e-mailed me with the sad news. She finally decided to call the number I had provided. It was indeed her father, but he had died the year before. His widow cried at hearing her voice and told her that her father had been searching for her his whole life. The two reunited and shared what they could.

Be open. Don’t let what you think you know, what you think the spelling of a name is, close your mind to the possibilities. Once you hire a researcher, you’ve acquired a partner that could lead you to a grand journey of discovery.

Associations for
Professional Genealogists

APG Directory of Professional Genealogists
The Association of Professional Genealogists
P.O. Box 40393
Denver, CO 80204-0393
<www.apgen.org>

Accredited Genealogists
International Commission for the Accreditation of Professional Genealogists (IcapGen)
P.O. Box 1144
Salt Lake City, UT 84111-1144
<www.infouga.org>

Certified Genealogists
Board for Certification of Genealogists
P.O. Box 14291
Washington, D.C. 20044
<www.bcgcertification.org>

Roseann Reinemuth Hogan, Ph.D., has been researching her family history since 1978. Her special interests include oral histories and social history.