In this post, we’ll go over what to do with your genealogy research before hiring a genealogist.
- Why you need to follow some essential steps before hiring a pro.
- The three things you want to do.
- What you'll get from this process, regardless if you actually hire someone or not!
What to Do Before Hiring a Genealogist: Essential Steps
Don't skip these essential steps if you're planning to hire a professional genealogist!
Thinking about hiring a genealogist to help with your family history research? It can be a real game-changer! As I mentioned in my previous posts "Is Hiring a Genealogist Worth It?" and "How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Genealogist?," professional genealogists provide the expertise, source access, and experience needed to uncover hidden connections and speed up your research.
But before you dive in and hire a pro, it's super important to get your genealogy information organized. Doing a bit of prep work can save you money and help you get better results. Plus, you might even stumble upon some exciting discoveries on your own, which is always a fun bonus!
In this post, we’ll go over the key steps you need to take before hiring a genealogist. Whether you decide to bring in a pro or keep digging on your own, these tips will help you make the most of your research.
Why Preparation Matters Before Hiring a Genealogist
I've been a professional genealogist nearly all of my adult life. I have seen so many genealogy projects, even going back before I started taking clients. There's one thing that is (sadly) consistent. It's a lack of preparation before hiring a pro, or even before asking a friend or colleague for help.
I've had a handful of clients that had everything prepped and ready and it made a huge difference in the results I could provide. They got better value for what they paid versus clients that just didn't know what to do other than send me a link to their online tree. It's such a major issue, I created a course Your Secret Weapon for Genealogy, to provide an in-depth resource to help potential clients as well as those who want to hire themselves.
So why is preparing so key? You're paying a professional to do something for you. Shouldn't you just be able to pay them and not worry about it?
Yes, you can do that. But genealogy doesn't work like other tasks where you could do it yourself or you could hire a pro. First, I'm going to focus on hobbyist genealogists, not a non-genealogist looking to start their family history. I';m also going to use the analogy of hiring a painter. Most of us could paint a room ourself and that is similar to a hobbysit genealogist considering hiring.
As a hobbyist genealogist, you've already done a bunch of work. So imagine a painter walks into a room and the client's done a lot of work, it's half painted, and half painted well. They can pick-up where you left off. They can instantly see the situation based only on you telling them what room you want painted and what color (or you simply provide the paint).
Many tasks clients are familiar with where they could do the work are simple like painting. Genealogy is like a task that is so complicated, you have to hire a pro to make sure it is done right. It just happens genealogy is fun to do, so you bothered to learn how to do it, plus the stakes are low. You won't end up with an IRS audit or burning your house down due to rewiring mistakes with genealogy. Your family tree can collapse if done wrong, but that's not as serious as a deck collapsing. Genealogy just doesn't naturally equate to other types of work you hire someone to do for you.
You can not see the situation in genealogy. Ever. Your family history is not a bucket of paint. It's not even the paint and the room. It's far more complex. In genealogy, it always takes explanation to understand where a project stands. If you're a hobbyist genealogist, you're hiring someone to pick up where you left off, not start from scratch. Your family tree can not portray the in-progress situation. It's only part of the story.
Are you getting an idea what the problem is?
If you don't prep your information, the professional is going to start from scratch or from what they can see. That almost always means they will redo work you've already done and suggest you do things you've already tried. It's like having your taxes done and dumping piles of material on the pro. They have the skill to work from what you provide but it will take longer and what if you forgot to include something? Usually a family tree leaves out much of the work, it just shows results.
Let's consider this with the painter example, because I don't do my own taxes so I can't illustrate this with taxes!
Providing just your family tree is like finding a painter, bringing them to your front door, asking them to paint "a room" and then walking off. They'll have to guess what room to paint and what color and finish to use. It doesn't matter the skill of the professional in such a situation, if you don't provide the right details, you won't get the results you are envisioning.
None of us would think hiring a painter and saying "paint the bathroom" would be a good idea when what we wanted was to have the hall powder room redone in a pink faux German plaster with dark trim. You want something very specific. Yet most people think they can leave out equally important details for their genealogy problem.
A genealogy project and a painting project don't mesh exactly as examples and that's likely why so many people don't understand the amount of detail needed for a genealogy project. Telling the genealogist who you want researched and providing a link to your online tree is like hiring a painter to paint a room. You've included the detail of wanting to paint a room versus the whole house or something else. A painting project requires a lot fewer details from you. Providing source-cited reports and your research log are like specifying the room and picking a paint color/finish. For painting it's easy information, in genealogy, not as much. If this information only exists in your head, the three things we suggest you do below will go a long way to getting you the results you want.
There are three things you can do to help get the best results possible for the money you're going to pay. The good news is, you don't have to follow these steps perfectly to get any result. The better job you do on your prep, the better the results you can get. But any prep is better than none. Basically, you've got nothing to lose by trying this prep work and a lot to potentially lose if you don't.
3 Things to Do with Your Research Before Hiring a Professional Genealogist
One thing to realize is every professional genealogist is different. We're people with different strengths, weaknesses, and preferences, just like you. I explain what to do as specifically as I can because I know most of my clients have needed this level of detail. But I explain this the way I want to see information. You should do these three things in general for any professional but exactly how you do it can vary.
Here are the three steps.
1. Pick ONE Genealogy Problem to Focus On
This is perhaps the number one most important thing to do and the thing you must do for every professional or suffer the consequences (I mean monetary cost when I say consequences). Any experienced genealogist can take your vague project and turn it into something they can work on. This is very much like hiring a painter to paint "a room" without information on which room or what color. The painter can paint but will they paint what you want or in a color you want if you aren't specific?
Experienced professionals will often force you to be more specific, but you can get your project going faster and get a better estimated cost if you decide exactly what you are interested in before you contact a professional. Less experienced professionals may not know what questions to ask you, so if you're vague, you'll end up spending more money on your project.
So how do you do this prep step? This one's the easiest.
Good starting points for a project are wanting to find a specific person, date, place, or event. If you're looking for the father of someone, a death or burial place, or the country of origin of an immigrant, those are specific people, dates, places, and events. But you may have a larger project that is still specific.
Maybe you want to join a lineage society. You either want to start by having the professional investigate which branch in your tree is likely to result in membership or telling them which branch you want researched for that purpose (telling them membership is the goal is key in this type of project).
You might want to create a gift for someone and the research is for that purpose. You might want to start researching a branch of the family tree and make more choices once you see the results. All of these are fairly narrow projects or a professional can quickly help you narrow the project to exactly what you want to start with.
What's not specific is "I want to research my family tree" or "I want to know where we came from." Even wanting to research one branch isn't usually specific enough. The difference in the types of examples above are, you either specified a person, date, or event, or you had a goal to focus the broader research (joining the lineage society, giving a gift--which means you have a completion date, starting one branch and then deciding--which is a check-in point).
Get as specific as possible. Your goal may be joining a lineage society but it's just one date/place requirement for your application that has you stuck. Your professional needs to know what information you want and for what purpose, otherwise research can go on and on. Also, porofessional genealogists usually have to try alternative solutions. If you don't provide an important detail like needing the research for a specific lineage society, you may get an alternative piece of information that is equivalent, but not helpful for your project.
The details matter in genealogy.
To drive this home, in the painting example for the really complex powder room, imagine you held back the details about the finish and trim and just said "paint it pink." You wouldn't expect to get the faux German plaster with dark trim, would you? What if you left out just the color? If you hold back details in genealogy, the results are similar. Don't assume anything, state what you expect. It may not be possible but I can guarantee your professional genealogist wants to address this before they start researching, not when they've spent their time and now you're disappointed or unhappy. Genealogy resutls can't be guaranteed, but a professional can shape your project based on what you're hoping for or would prefer to find. If one thing won't work, details from you can help them pivot to the next best thing from your point of view. Otherwise they'll pivot to what they think is the next best thing.
2. Gather and Review
The next thing you need to do, and this is after you decide on your narrowed project, is gather everything you have about that project. That's why you do this next. It can be a big task if you've been researching a long time. You don't want to be hunting for everything on a set of grandparents when your project ends up being about the father of one of them. Narrow your project and then gather and review.
This step is the most complicated and the one who's results will vary the most between professional genealogists. I created Your Secret Weapon to give my clients an exact way to gather, review, and summarize. It walks through what I want to see and even how I like to see it (this allows me to work as fast as possible so the client gets the most bang for their buck).
Other professionals may want different material and a different presentation of that material. However, Your Secret Weapon for Genealogy can also be used if the person you're hiring is yourself. In other words, it's a way to gather, review, and summarize regardless if you will hire someone or you will do the follow-up research.
The reason Your Secret Weapon works for both situations is why gathering and review is key when hiring a professional. This is where you double check what you've already done. You relay this to the professional so they don't repeat that work. The more succinctly you can relay this information, without leaving out important details, the better results you get (i.e. the professional spends less time reviewing this information). This is similar to dumping the receipts on a tax perparer. If they have good business sense, they charge by time, so disorganized receipts cost more to prepar than everyting organized and labeled. That's the concept you're using with your review. Yes, you can dump the "receipts" of your research on a professional genealogist, but it costs more than you going through everything ahead of time.
This is also your chance to recreate a research log if you didn't track your research as you worked (it isn't possible to completely recreate a research log after the fact, but the best shot is when reviewing). You might even discover you've had the solution to your problem all along but forgot about it or didn't recognize it as a solution when you first found it. Once again, professionals would rather you discover this before hiring them so you aren't unhappy at the end. Most of us charge the same to research or to organize your material. If you're happy with getting a result, even if it was just due to organizing the mess of research, dumping everything on a professional is fine. I've considered it myself with some of my early research I've never had time to get back to. But it's hard to pay someone to do what you know you could do yourself, if you just had some time.
The professional's work (and yours if you're the researcher) is only as good as the foundation it is built on. Finding ALL the work you've already done and reviewing it is the first step in making sure the foundation is complete. Then you need to summarize it.
Hint: Your family tree is not gathering and reviewing. It is a family tree. Most people did work that is not attached to their family tree. This should be seen in their research log or other tracking method and includes the research you did that did not provide information you could enter in your tree.
Many genealogists also found information that never made it to their tree. Additionally, a family tree does not explain how the attached sources lead to the relationship and information. The professional deduces this if the information in the tree matches the information in the sources but if any of it conflicts, the tree itself doesn't explain how certain information was chosen. This is part of summarizing or reporting.
I think of my online tree like a file cabinet. A file cabinet does not tell you about your research. It simply holds copies of what you've found. An online tree is a better organizational structure for lineage-linked data than a traditional file cabinet and it can provide a summary of information, too. But it does not show or tell how you reached your results.
It can be deduced the attached record(s) provided the information seen in the tree but it does not explain conflicting information, which variation is correct, information that doesn't have an attached source, or what you have tried that is not attached. It's a great filing cabinet since it's maybe three clicks to open a document, but it doesn't provide most of what the professional needs. If you did a good job researching, that means just an online tree will leave the professional redoing the quality work you already did.
What's mainly missing from your family tree is your research log and summaries or reports. That leads us to step 3.
3. Summarize
Summarizing, at the least, is explaining where the project stands. If you don't gather and review, you should at least summarize what you remember. I've made this step three because if you do all three steps, this should be last. But if you're really short on time, and prefer to just pay the professional to do what they can, you can skip the review. In that case, you will summarize based on what you remember which isn't as involved as summarizing after reviewing.
Here are some basic questions to get you started summarizing. You can answer these for yourself and then try and summarize the project for a professional based on your answers. If you come up with more questions as you work through these, write down the question and your answer.
- What is the project (that was the first task)?
- Why is that the project? In other words, why do you need help with this problem?
- Is information missing or conflicting?
- Do you have a hypothesis but not proof?
- Why is that your hypothesis?
If you keep coming back to "I'm stuck," with no idea of a possible answer (a possible answer is a "hypothesis"), a research log is vital. Not knowing why you're stuck or how to get unstuck means the professional needs to know what you've tried.
If your answer to the second question above is "I'm stuck," and you don't have a research log, start describing in writing what you've tried. Get as specific as you are able. (Hint: just start writing this down for yourself. You'll remember things out of order. It's important to remember, so organize your information later--but do organize it to allow the professional to review it as quickly as possible, time equals money in a genealogy project).
Your professional will have questions if all you give them are names, dates, and places. If you cite your sources, that helps but it takes time to review sources. If it's necessary to actually look at copies of the documents, that takes more time than if you summarize the project and cite your sources. Once again, time equals money in a genealogy project.
With Your Secret Weapon, we show you how to use a D.E.P.S. Chart, that's a specific type of timeline, to review, summarize, and analyze your existing research for one person/problem. Your Secret Weapon was designed to minimize the textual summarizing needed while still helping us see which source provided every piece of information. It should also allow the hobbyist to start asking him or herself the questions a professional asks when reviewing information.
More Reason to Prep Your Family History Before Hiring
Money is the big reason you need to perform the three main tasks before hiring a professional. There's another reason to do these that I've only briefly alluded to.
When you're going to hire a professional, narrowing your project, gathering and reviewing your existing research, and summarizing saves money/gets you better results. When you do all of these actions, you may even make discoveries that make it unnecessary to hire a professional or you can hire them for a different project.
Your Secret Weapon for Genealogy was designed to help you bust your own brick wall. In other words, it's so you can be your own professional. But, if you still need help, it gets everything organized so you can hire us or another professional and get the best results possible.
How We Can Help
Through The Occasional Genealogist LLC, we now offer two options for paid 1:1 help. We also offer a variety of educational options both free and paid, including the free posts on this blog.
Genealogy Research Project
I offer 1:1 research projects on U.S. topics. I specialize in southeastern U.S. research, particularly northwest Georgia. I also specialize in projects involving multiple U.S. locations (where hiring a specialist in each location is impractical for you). I have a separate site where you can learn more about my research service at, georgia-genealogy.com and contact me for more information.
Genealogy Coaching & Reviews
This is a more affordable option than 1:1 done-for-you research that lets you keep all the fun of research while still getting a helping hand.
Our coaching service is a remote/written coaching as opposed to live/virtual coaching. You provide digital material which your coach reviews on their schedule and writes a response to. You review their suggestions and research/update your information before the next session. This means there are no scheduling issues or problems due to different time zones!
A "review" is a essentially a single coaching session. The first session of a coaching package is always a review of what you've done. Adding another session makes it coaching because there is back and forth between you and the professional.
If you're unsure if you want to pursue a full 1:1 done-for-you research project, a review is the perfect place to start. All professional research projects start with a review, I just separate it out as a stand-alone option where you can progress to coaching, or if you prefer, a full research project.
