How would I go about offering my genealogy services?

Question

I really enjoy genealogy, and I want to do it professionally. I have taken som e courses and my expience is with my own tree. I managed to trace my history back to 1345 with not even knowing the names of my great grandparents. I know alot of people want to know there history but either dont know how or dont want to take the time that it needs to find the information. It took my about 2 weeks of full 6 hour days to complete my tree and get records and photos. I also found many celebrities in my tree which I know people are curious about. I plan on getting certified but dont know how to offer my services nationally. Its too difficult to compete with local societies as they have researchers with years of expience and they are usually expensive. I dont want to get rich but would like to make a living doing what I enjoy.

Answer 1

If I read your message correctly, you got back to 1345 in 2 weeks?

If so, you were fooled or you picked the right grandparents very, very carefully; at least one had been "done" by a good genealogist who published his/her research, and you copied it without verifying too closely.

If you didn't get back to 1345 in 2 weeks, your writing skills need polishing. Speaking of which, you have a there/their problem in one sentence.

Trees are never "complete". You reach a dead end, where your ancestors vanish into the mists of time, illiteracy, intestate deaths and 23 women all named "Polly".  (Unless you mean you completed the [3? 4? 5?] generations the Mormons ask their members to do.)

"many celebrities" should make the needle on your suspicion meter quiver. Your message bent mine around the post.

You can advertise your services. ("Have Census, Will dig.") I can advertise mine a garden designer. Someone with a degree in landscape architecture and membership in a professional society is going to command higher fees and get more customers than I would.

You can advertise your services without being certified, as long as you don't claim to be anything you are not, like certified. You can let people hire you to go to the library for them or look things up on the Internet for them. Ancestry or Heritage Quest would probably get upset if they knew you were using your private subscription for commercial gain.

Most professionals work in their area for people from out of the area. 12 hours at $35 an hour is often less than air fare, hotels and meals. A rare few work for rich people too busy to learn how to do it themselves.

Answer 2

Start by joining the local societies and learning from the best. You don't have to compete with them. Most of us work through other groups so that the marketing is done by the group and we get to pick and choose our projects when they come in. You don't mention where your ancestors were from, but it's clearly not the US or Canada. So pick one or two of the areas where you really enjoyed researching and get intimate with their history and their resources. For most certifying agencies, it's actually a requirement. Once you get prowess as a researcher in a given country or region, you become more valuable. Even a country like Switzerland, which seems to simple on the surface, requires a lot of specialization to understand all the differences between the German, Italian and French areas. You need to know how to search in Catholic, Orthodox and Christian/Lutheran/Evangelical churches in the region. You need to know which religions believe in infant baptism and which only have a baptism of believers doctrine.

Once you have a region of specialty, you can market yourself better, and you can partner with others who have complementary skills from other regions and start working in a partnership. You also start writing letters to attorneys throughout your state sharing your credentials as a certified researcher. You can charge 5x more to an attorney to do research at your state archives, in remote parts of the state, and helping to prove lineages and property ownership in estate situations.

One of the things you do need to know is that you need to have the certification before you start advertising. One of the things that trips people up is that different states and countries have different standards for who can represent themselves as a genealogist. If you don't have the credentials and you advertise on the internet, then someone responding to your ad has a certain expectation of your credentials based on what it means where they are. Not many people hire someone in their local area. They usually hire someone in the region where their own research is snagged. So you need to have the credentials to meet the expectations of a Canadian or a Brit or a Jamaican if that's who's hiring you.