Elizabeth’s Journal

Doing Family History for Others

About a year ago I convinced a friend to let me practice on her to see if doing genealogy as a professional endeavor was realistic. I needed to know what was involved, what tools I needed available, how long it really took me to do things, etc. I made some progress for a month or so, and then Kayleigh got too big for me to do work during the day anymore, and the project languished for many months.

At the end of August I picked it up again, after having done some very beneficial reading over the summer regarding professional genealogy and general small-business information. I have been having a ball, and it’s possible I’m more excited about what I have uncovered than my client will be! Which is nice, because it signals that I do find this interesting in and of itself, rather than because it’s a family line of my own. The hard part is that I see how hard it is to stop doing research in order to take stock of where one is and write a research summary report, which really is quite vital and useful even when doing it for one’s own research.

Once I am done with this project, my intention is to write research reports for all the lines I am working on. Doing actual research right now is difficult not only because I still can’t do anything during the day (and at night I’m often mentally exhausted) but also because I am really far past the point that I need to summarize where I am on particular lines (Struble, Ford, Karl, etc.), consider and prioritize what should be searched next, and in general highlight what is known and what is not. Also, to do more research will probably require shelling out some bucks to ancestry.com or genealogy.com, and I’m not ready to do that, both from a preparedness viewpoint and a financial position. So doing the research reports will keep me busy a while and definitely make sure that when I do launch back into research, it will be *much* more focused than I was before, and hopefully that will turn up more results.