how much to get professional genealogist

gercoral · 23-08-2016 7:45pm #1

does anyone know how much it would cost to hire a professional researcher/genealogist to research your family tree?

pinkypinky · 23-08-2016 9:03pm

It depends on how much work has to be done.
Genealogists normally charge between €30 - €60 an hour, plus expenses like getting certs (€4 per).

spurious · 23-08-2016 9:31pm

It can mount up quickly. Someone could spend three or four hours looking through registers only to find nothing, but still need to be paid for their time.

I contacted a US based 'no job too small' genealogist to price getting a NY death cert. I had the date and almost (but not quite) all the info needed. The town the person died in could have had records in a number of archives. He would have had to check four, maybe five places. His return email informed me his lowest price for a job was 3500US$.
I passed.

pinkypinky · 23-08-2016 10:06pm

Ouch!

When people contact me, I ask them to set the budget. If they want to pay €200, I tell them what I can do in that timeframe, based on what they already know.

hjr · 24-08-2016 9:55am

I would say initially is to try and do as much work as you can yourself, and take your time at it. Anything you find can be used at a later date to help any potential genealogist to focus on your family.

Also, don't underestimate the enjoyment value in doing the work yourself! I know its not possible for everyone to do it themselves, but I'm certainly glad I did the legwork in my case, and the sense of enjoyment/satisfaction you get when you get a breakthrough is great....or perhaps that's just me!!

I spent nearly two days at the weekend doing research on one particular corner of my family tree, and through a combination or Ancestry, Familysearch, Legacy.com, whitepages.com, findagrave.com and facebook, I was able to make contact with a third cousin living in New York! It's a great feeling when it works out!

gercoral · 24-08-2016 9:37pm

thanks for the info! got a good bit done in college for one of my modules..this was before we discovered that our great grandfather was married at least three times! and relations coming forward with different or conflicting info.
and then seemingly people used to lie about their age so that they could get pension quicker and the like. and they all have the same feckin name..it's gets so confusing and brain melting!

setting a budget is quite a good idea. i think everyone knows where they stand then and there aren't any surprises

pinkypinky · 24-08-2016 10:03pm

Lying about their age to get the pension is a bit of a fallacy. Age was not the only criteria and people mostly did just not know their own age exactly.

VirginiaB · 29-08-2016 2:49pm

I have done a tremendous amount on my own. Obviously the internet has changed the world. How did people do genealogy before? I stand in awe of them. But I still have some brick walls that have caused me to think of hiring someone to help. But with the prices mentioned above...not going to happen.

L1011 · 29-08-2016 2:54pm

VirginiaB wrote: »

How did people do genealogy before?.

Slowly, expensively (although those of us who used the pay per go IFHF may think we had it dear) and most importantly, unreliably. I've found everything from wrong dates to missing kids in the extensively researched (for the time) tree my great uncle who died in 1999 had done.

VirginiaB · 29-08-2016 3:09pm

I used IFHF a lot in the pay-per-go days. Could have bought a plane ticket with what I spent. No site ever drove me crazier--yet I had just enough success that I kept on spending til it just got too pricey. The Las Vegas of genealogy.

pedroeibar1 · 29-08-2016 10:40pm

VirginiaB wrote: »

.... Obviously the internet has changed the world. How did people do genealogy before? I stand in awe of them..

Most of us can get back to the Famine with a bit of effort – say 170 years. The Victorian genealogists going back the same number of years would reach about 1700. They did everything by letter and while it was ’slow’ by internet standards, it worked quite well as the postal service was quite fast, with two deliveries – morning and evening – six days a week. Those genealogists generally were from more ‘important’ families and had more assistance, more cash and better source material / records.

Some of the trees I’ve worked on (local history projects) never can be verified as source records are long gone. For example in Victorian publications like ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine’ or ‘Miscellanea Heraldica et Genealogica’ or old journals like JCHAS one finds trees listed with comments like “Will proved in 1746, in which he names his wife Catherine and his sons William, George and brother John.” Or “I have not been able to determine the birth order of these children as the parish records between April 1665 to January 1708 are missing, but X was the first to marry, followed by Y”.

On the other hand I’ve discovered some 'howlers' by reputable Victorians when trying to input data into a treemaker programme, with women giving birth at nine or fifty years and deliberate false trails/claims – often to hide the ‘base’ pedigree of a wife or husband. Burke regularly turned a blind eye to such antics…

The Web was initially an invention to put science researchers in contact but genealogists were among the earliest adapters - the first geno email I received on my surname was a random contact from Pennsylvania in 1996 to my work email. The internet is a double-edged sword; the amount of plain wrong information on my family posted on the WWW is staggering, but I’ve also garnered huge amounts of worthwhile data and some great contacts.

how much to get professional genealogist

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