After all, with so many online genealogy sites, like Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org, why would anyone possibly want to spend money on hiring someone to do what you can just do for yourself?
When I first started researching my family almost ten years ago I eagerly accepted every hint and just took it on faith that the other people building their own family trees knew what they doing.
If only it had been as simple as clicking on those adorable little leaves!
It was only much later that I realized how unreliable information found only on family trees can be: I found female ancestors apparently bearing children in their 70s, children born before parents, the same person being born in two different states or countries, the list goes on. Like many others I just assumed that what other people were posting was “true enough” and that meant it must be good enough.
Now, I’m slowly pruning away all the unreliable branches of my family tree on Ancestry.com, but with 1017 ancestors and 6513 hints, it will probably be several years before all the misinformation has been sheared away.
Professional Genealogists often have either many years of experience, formal training, or both. We’ve learned what to focus on and what to disregard, and what’s likely to be reliable and what should just be ignored. We can tune out the forest and just focus on your family tree.
One of the more valuable services Professional Genealogists can provide is time, as in, saving you the often massive amounts of time you have to put in to find the online documentation to reliably prove ancestry. You have a life, and you’d like to live it! You probably don’t want to spend it digitally flipping through several hundred pages of scribbly handwriting while getting eyestrain.
Then there’s the DNA analysis. This can be one of the most challenging aspects of genealogy, and I’m saying this as someone with a background in biochemistry! DNA results can be incredibly laborious to interpret. You don’t receive a packet that neatly explains how your matches fit into your family tree. Usually, you’ll need to upload your results into GEDmatch in order to fully extract and analyze the information. That means being familiar with a variety of tools and the limitations of each. A Professional Genealogist can also help advise you on which kind of DNA test is right for you depending on what you’re curious about. Since certain DNA tests can be hundreds of dollars getting guidance beforehand can be especially helpful.
Image via DNA Painter
Then there are the most confounding obstacles in all of genealogy: Brick Walls.
Brick walls are what genealogists call those intensely frustrating proverbial dead ends. You know you’re ancestor had to have parents, after all, they exist and you exist, so their parents must exist, too, But you can’t seem to find a single reference to them anywhere.
Professional Genealogists have learned the kinds of places to look to find those seemingly non-existent ancestors.
Maybe they’re mentioned in a probate record. Maybe the only time your 4th Great-Grandmother’s name is listed is when she gave up her right to dower when a piece of family land was sold. Maybe your ancestor only goes by a nickname that has since fallen out of use. Or maybe they go by multiple first names AND surnames (it’s more common than you think)! We’ve mastered how to think creatively and flexibly when searching and we understand that a name is just one of many identifiers; with the combination of multiple traits marking someone as unique in historical records.
Or perhaps you’re interested in joining a Lineage Society, such as the National Society Sons of the American Revolution. Joining such societies can allow members free access to genealogical resources and libraries with some even offering scholarships and grants for historic preservation.
The application process for many of these societies can be fairly rigorous, requiring as many primary and original documents as is possible and reasonable for each applicant. The bar for proof in genealogy is actually quite high and navigating this can be overwhelming. Many of the online documents one can find on Ancestry.com simply aren’t sufficient as many of these are actually considered secondary proof because they are transcriptions of primary documents (or transcriptions of transcriptions).
Experienced and well trained genealogists know how to recognize signs of transcription and how to tell from the genealogy website citation the likelihood that an online document is primary, secondary, or original. We also know where to look to find primary and original forms of documentation, making the likelihood of being accepted by a particular Lineage Society quite good.
All-in-all, genealogists can provide a wide range of services, often at very reasonable prices, for a variety of projects, both large and small.
If you’re interested in a free consultation please email: