Why Hire a Professional?

Why hire a professional when there are offers of FREE look - ups all over the internet? There are many good reasons that come to mind. The most common are: frustration, geographic limitations, and time constraints. Having searched every document within your means, and having placed messages on every site you could find for your SURNAMES, your patience is waning after weeks (months - years) of no responses or dead leads.

**The difference between look-ups and professional genealogical research**

A records agent looks up individual records, but a professional genealogist:
  • determines which records would be most likely to solve a particular problem
  • looks up those records
  • then analyses the information before taking the next step to solve the puzzle
For example, a records agent will simply obtain copies of records already known to exist. Many clients know that their Wilhelm Schmidt served in a Wisconsin regiment in the Civil War and wish to have a copy of his service record, or the Social Security Death Index has told them their ancestor's death occurred in March 1964 and they desire a copy of the obituary from a Wisconsin newspaper. A records agent would simply obtain those copies.

As a professional genealogist, I serve as a records agent, but the balance of my time is spent using original and secondary records to solve problems of relationship or national origin.

Many of my clients have hit a brick wall in their own research or have no interest in personally performing research. Some clients have gathered conflicting information from free look-ups and information found on the Internet, and desire to document and prove their pedigree. They ask me for help to find the records to prove or disprove their findings for the sake of accuracy.

These clients ask me to find out if the Wilhelm Schmidt in Wisconsin is related to their Ferdinand Schmidt who came to Wisconsin from Pennsylvania in 1870, or to find out where Wilhelm Schmidt's ancestors came from. A simple lookup is not going to solve these problems and many records may have to be consulted. A professional genealogist knows from experience which records are most likely to answer these questions, where they are located, and how to correctly interpret the information contained in those records.

It is highly unlikely that either type of research can be performed successfully from home with books, CD's and free look-ups from others on the Internet to compile a full and accurate genealogy. Hiring a professional genealogist can save you frustration, time and money, and in the end, is not as expensive an option as some might expect.