Do Genealogists get paid well?

Question

I have become very interested in genealogy after tracing my family tree back to the year 1345. and found I was in blood relation to James Dean, Jackie "O", Judy Garland, Jesse James and a few others. I started taking some workshops. I want to know if it is worth becoming certified, will I make a decent income or is it a waste of time? What Do genealogists usually make for building someones tree or tracing an ancestor?

Answer 1

The answer is "it depends". I specialize in research in Canada, Central Europe and the Midwestern US. You have to know not only how to use online resources, but also how to use all of the available archives, libraries and research centers available. If you don't specialize, you won't be as valuable to most potential clients. It's not something that "just anyone" can do "anywhere, anytime". Knowing the history of a region intimately is vital in knowing how to research in areas where records only began in the last 100-120 years.

It's also not common for a professional genealogist to focus on just doing a family tree. To be a lucrative profession, you have to be willing and able to do work for attorneys and the courts, using your professional credentials and research skills to help settle complicated inheritance and property issues. This is actually the bulk of my work. Attorneys pay $250-500/hour for us to research in dusty record rooms. They're looking for the records to prove that someone is or is not a legitimate heir, that a piece of property passed from one generation to another without proper registration (but still by will, so it was a legal passage). They're looking for alternative forms of record keeping when birth certificates and death certificates didn't exist.

A famous case from Canada in the 1930s required tracking every legitimate heir of one of the founders of Montreal. The issue was whether the Sulpician order improperly took over a land grant in the Place d'Armes and never properly paid for it. It would have meant millions of dollars in past due rents and the question of the ownership of the Basilica de Notre Dame and the Banc de Montreal. It took significant research to prove that every claimant was or was not the legitimate heir of someone who died more than 200 years earlier. The heirs lost the case, but the records of the genealogists involved were invaluable.

As for what we charge for doing simple research. The standard is between $50-150/hour, plus the costs for the records, the translations, travel, etc. There's usually a 10 hour minimum. A few researchers in Canada want a $1500 minimum.

The farther the records are from the US, the more it costs. Researching from the US into Eastern Europe can easily cost upwards of $750/hour if we have to hire someone in an obscure place to find records and translate them for us. That's what it took in the 1990s to even find someone willing to research in Bosnia and send the records here. God knows I wasn't going there to search through old records in a battle zone.