How to Hire a Professional Genealogist: Finding a Professional

So you've decided to hire a professional genealogist to help with your family history project. So how do you find one? Well, a great source to find a professional genealogist is to go to the association of Professional Genealogists website and use their directory. You can find them@apgin.org. To use the directory, go to Find a professional and then select Directory. When it opens, you'll find an alphabetical listing of all the members that take clients. However, there's also a search field on the right side that can really help you. Picking the correct options on this search field can really make a difference. I recommend that most people consider their research needs as far as a location. However, you may also need research specialties. So let's start by research counties. This comes up as an alphabetical list, but you can start typing just to see what your options are. Once you've entered what you choose, click Search. That's me. If you prefer, you can look under research specialties. You may be needing a different type of specialty not tied to one geographic location. You can see some of the options here. And once again, these are alphabetical. A popular option is DNA. In addition, you can also pick particular states. Instead of just a county, You can choose research time periods if that'll help. You can choose non research specialties. You can choose the residence, although this you will need to type in. You can also specify languages and repositories. Neither of these, the languages or the repositories are drop down lists, so you'll need to have an idea what to enter. This can be a little difficult with repositories because some people enter them using an abbreviation and others don't. I recommend trying some of the other options first to create a narrowed down list and then seeing if the repositories are available. Once you find somebody, you can choose Contact or view their profile. I recommend going ahead and viewing someone's profile to see how they match up to what you are looking for. The information on this page is entered by the genealogists themselves. You can see on my page I've included a number of links to learn more information about me. However, you may or may not find this on other people's pages. It just depends on what their background is and what they've decided to share. They may have a link to a blog or their website. They may have their email address. They may have a phone number, a mailing address. They may have files that you can look at. And of course you can review all the information about them. Here's the non Research specialties I decided to research specialties research counties, states, countries and time periods. As I said, these will vary depending on whose profile you're looking at. Once you've decided this genealogist may be a good match, you can go ahead and contact them. You can also go back and enter other information to find someone else that might be a better match for your needs or or to contact a couple different people to get some different information. There's also additional information on the APG website, including information on how to hire a professional genealogist. This information can be helpful if you've never done this before and you just want a little background information. Most professional genealogists are self employed and so they can vary quite greatly from the information you'll see here and from one to the other. This is actually good because there's a lot of room in genealogy for different needs and different ways to run a business. So go ahead and contact a few different people and figure out which one is the best fit for your preferences, your needs and your genealogy project. I hope you've enjoyed this video learning how to use the directory on the APG website I'm Jennifer Dondero. Sam.