When to Hire a Professional Researcher

Have you been wondering if it is time to look for some outside assistance in your genealogical research? Some people hesitate because they think hiring a consultant is a luxury that is beyond their budget. But in my experience this has not been the case. The time saved and the new information and contacts I have gained from working with consultants have more than made up for their very reasonable fees.   

There are many reasons that might propel a person into the world of working with paid consultants.

First, when you are doing out of state research, someone actually living in that area can be very helpful.  That person can visit archives or other record depositories to search for information. An in-person search is much faster than ordering records by mail. Not all records have been digitized or are available on the computer. And a local person may know of places to research in the area that you have not thought of.

The first time that I worked with an outside consultant was in 2007 when I needed some documents from the Briggs Lawrence County Public Library in Ironton, OH. By studying their webpage, I found that Briggs has microfilm of marriages in Lawrence County from 1817 - present. I was searching for the marriage record of George Washington Spears (b. 1858 in Fayette Township and married in 1887 to Frances Henrietta Allis). But I couldn’t physically get to Briggs at that time so I needed some on-site help.

I didn't know any researchers living in Lawrence County. But I knew that a good place to go for local genealogy information is always the local genealogical society.
I looked at the Lawrence County Genealogical Society web page for suggested researchers. This is where I found Ellen Gammon whom I first contacted by e-mail. And this was the beginning of a professional relationship that has been so valuable to me in my research in Ohio. Ms. Gammon goes far beyond “business as usual”. An example of her care, local knowledge and desire to be of help to family members seeking to know their Lawrence ancestors is this map that she sent me when I finally had the chance to arrange a trip to OH:

Without this map, I never could have found the Union Hill Cemetery in Union Township, Lawrence County, OH.

Photo taken by Bert Schuster 4/10/2008

About a month ago, a consultant found me just when I needed him. I recently picked up the trail of my great grandfather, Henry Kreis, living in Irvington, Essex, NJ in 1920. Until a few weeks ago, I had no knowledge of Henry’s whereabouts after his divorce from my great grandmother, Mary Carney, in 1906 in Chicago, IL. I discovered that Henry had married a second time in NJ to Henrietta Hausmann Williams – who happened to be a character witness at his divorce trial!

From Essex, NJ census records, I knew that John Kreis, Henry’s father, was also living in Newark with his daughter-in-law, Henrietta and his grandchildren. I was hoping to find more information on this branch of my family, so I put a message on the Essex County, NJ forum of genforum.com. The next day Tom Ankner, a local researcher from Newark, NJ, responded to my posting and offered his services. Not only was Tom able to search the state archives for me and find a death certificate for John Kreis, but he suggested another local contact that proved immensely valuable.

Tom had heard about a local genealogist, Mary Lish, who had “adopted” a cemetery where some of her ancestors were buried. In the last ten years, Mary has digitized many of the burial cards and headstone information from Woodland Cemetery in Newark. She holds an annual “Photo Day” when volunteers clean up parts of the graveyard. This cemetery, like many local graveyards, has little funding for physical maintenance let alone record keeping. Without people like Mary Lish, many burial records and gravestones would be lost to the damages of time.

Photo taken by Tom Ankner 8/2011

Mary was able to look at her spreadsheet and locate not only John Kreis but several other Hausmanns. I was in for a special surprise. On a burial card for the Kreis/Hausmann plot was a note that Henrietta Kreis was buried in Hollywood Cemetery! Now I needed Tom Ankner. He was able to visit Hollywood and take pictures for me.

In my opinion, no research plan is complete without the knowledge of when it’s time to hire an outside professional. Sometimes this decision will mean finding a piece of the puzzle of ancestor knowledge that you might otherwise have missed.

In my next post, I will address in more detail what to do after you decide you want to hire a professional researcher. This will include ideas about where to find lists of people offering their services and where to find information on the actual contractual process. How do you negotiate the fee? What will you get for what you pay?

Categories: genealogy professional

Message Boards v. Mailing Lists

On my last post, Sept 19, I talked about my experience with GenForum, a message board provided by genealogy.com. But until this week, I didn’t know that there was a difference between a message board and a mailing list.

And as happens often in genealogy, you learn something new when you have a question that you need answered and you ask for help. That’s where Kate Herron, my friend/mentor from Chicago, IL, and the mailing list come in.

The question that I needed answered came from a marriage license for my maternal great grandparents, Peter Fleseras and Louise Miller. I found the document at FamilySearch.org.

 The document says the marriage was performed by the rector of St. Andrews in Chicago, IL in 1901. But I couldn’t read the name of the rector. Hard- to-read handwriting is one of the things that plague genealogists.

I know that Peter Fleseras was Greek and that Louis Miller’s father (Frederick Miller) was German and her mother (Catherine Norton) was Irish, from County Mayo. Which church would they probably have attended? Greek Orthodox? Catholic? Protestant?

I googled for St. Andrew in Chicago, IL and found both a Greek Orthodox and a Catholic.The Greek Orthodox St.Andrew opened in 1926 – after the 1901 marriage. The Catholic St. Andrew opened in 1895 – well in time for the 1901 event.

I tried some analysis on my own. Catholics don’t usually write “clergyman” on a document. They put “priest”. And “rector” didn’t seem to be the usual Catholic choice of words either.

I was stumped so I e-mailed Kate for help. Kate suggested that I post a message on the Cook County Mailing List, gave me the following web address, said to be sure I linked to my marriage document, and told me to be careful to use digest mode: http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/usa/IL/cook.html

Well, this gave me plenty of challenges. I didn’t know that rootsweb.com had a mailing list function although I had been using their WorldConnect section for years (see future post). Second, I didn’t know what “digest mode” meant. And third, I didn’t know how to “link” inside a mailing list post.

Here’s where I can offer a piece of advice: never abuse your community of friends and mentors by asking pesky questions that you can find the answers for yourself. Save them for the BIG questions. So I started educating myself about message boards and mailing lists.

I went to the wikipedia site on internet forums to find out exactly what these two forms of communication are and how they differ. To paraphrase wikipedia, a message board, or web forum, is an internet discussion site where people have conversations that take the form of back and forth message postings.

A mailing list (in the link scroll down to "Comparison with other Web applications")  is also an internet discussion site with posted messages. It differs from a message board mainly in how messages are retrieved. On a mailing list, new messages come directly to your e-mail inbox; whereas on a message board, you have to log-on to the site to see messages. Some message boards, like GenForum, will send you an e-mail notification that there are messages waiting for you at the forum site.

stock image from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

My next self-education step was to find out what was “digest mode”. I returned to rootsweb.com and went to the Help section.The difference this time comes in the way you receive messages from the list. In “mail mode”, you receive each single message at the time it is sent to the list. That could be a lot of messages in your inbox. In “digest mode” you receive a group of messages once a day or so. This latter way cuts way down on traffic to your inbox.

Armed with this information, I was ready to go. I subscribed to Cook-CO-IL-L by following the instructions at that site.  I received a message response from the administrator of the list that  included an address of the list that I should send my messages to.

I posted my message on Cook-CO-IL-L on Tuesday, Sept 20, 2011 and in two days received several answers. I hit the jackpot with the message suggesting that I check out the 1900 Lakeside Chicago City Directory at ChicagoAncestor.org.

stock image from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

Now this is a funny thing about genealogy researching. Many times we know about a particular resource and may have even used it several times before. But then we may file it away in our minds and not think of it. This is what happened in this case. Well, I wasted no time going to the ChicagoAncestors site and in the front section of the directory, I struck gold. On p. 18 there was a list of churches in 1900 Chicago. Can you imagine how I felt when I saw:

St. Andrew’s Church – Washington boul(evard) Cor(ner) S. Robey. Rector, Rev. W.C. DeWitt.

This was it! As I looked back at the nearly indecipherable signature of the clergyman on the license, everything just fell into place.

You can be sure that I will make more use of the mailing list feature of rootsweb.com in the future.  And by the way, rootsweb.com also has a message board feature.

Categories: genealogy community, genealogy tool

Building a Community with GenForum



 

Stock image from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

Many people have heard the old expression: “Two heads (or more) are better than one”. In genealogy this axiom is especially true. But I didn’t find this out until years after I had been researching on my own.

Probably like you, I just started my family research by looking at the census and talking to relatives (of which I have only a few that are known to me).

 Soon I was sending away for records and finding many pieces. Sometimes the pieces just didn’t fit together.

 

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

When I moved to Augusta, GA in 2006, I met A.S., a very talented genealogist who has become a good friend. Not too soon after we met, I had an idea that if I could find some living relatives in the Kreis line, I might be able to make some of my pieces fit. But I wondered -- how best to do this?

A.S. suggested that I post a message on GenForum.com. Well going public like that intimidated me back then. I was concerned about privacy issues. However, the drive to find out more family information overrode my initial reluctance. And I can truly say that posting on GenForum became one of the most valuable and rewarding things I have ever done in genealogy. And another benefit is that it is easy to do with a computer.

stock photo from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

Now back in the days before the internet, if you wanted to put out a query or question about an ancestor, you had to search for a place to post it. If you were lucky enough to live near a genealogy society, you could post it on a bulletin board there. Or you could search for a genealogy journal or magazine that covered the geographic area where your ancestor lived. Then you could leave your address and wait until someone who might know of your ancestor might look at the journal/magazine and might see your posting. Well you can see that the probability of success was not too great.

stock photo from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

But now we are in the Age of the Internet. And this is where GenForum.com comes in. If you go to the home page, you will see that GenForum uses what the company calls “forums” to guide people to groups of interest to them. These groups or forums are arranged around surnames and geographic place names. There are forums for US cities, counties and states and for countries all over the world. And if you can’t find a forum that fits your needs, you can start one!

Besides posting to a forum, you can also search archived messages in a forum. If you are looking for “Henry Kreis”, you can go to the Kreis forum and put “Henry Kreis” in the search box.

Next it’s time to post your own messages. Think of all the possible forums that might lead you to some new information on your family. In my case, I posted to my surnames and to the states where they lived in America. I haven’t yet been able to identify for many of my ancestors the county/city/town where they came from in Europe, so I haven’t posted to many international forums.

Both the opportunities and the power of this medium are incredible. I once put a general message on the Greek forum and received a response from a very kind genealogist in Athens who isn’t related to me at all but just likes to help Americans learn more about their Greek roots.

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Posting on the Chicago forum in GenForum helped me find a wonderful genealogist who lives in Chicago and has helped me many times to think through a puzzle. If left to my own devices, I might slowly sink into one of many genealogical sand traps:

• Tyring to force a “fit” when there isn’t one
• Not being able to see the forest for the trees
• Overlooking a clue that is right there crying out for you to see
• Looking in the wrong place for a record and not knowing where the right place might be

And this is to name just a few.

In conclusion, two heads (and more) are needed to be successful at genealogy. Or to paraphrase Hillary Clinton, “It takes a village to do family research successfully.” So start building your village with GenForum.

Categories: genealogy community, research terms