Hiring A Professional Researcher: Interview with Rebecca Whitman Koford, CG®

Hiring a professional researcher can be a great idea but may be intimidating to some genealogists. You may have questions about how to pick one, or how to work with one. Rebecca Whitman Koford, Certified Genealogist®, graciously agreed to an interview to share why you might want to hire a professional researcher and how to get the most out of the experience.

When should a person hire a professional researcher?

There are many reasons to hire a professional researcher. It all depends on your goal.

You can hire a professional researcher when you do not have the time to do the research yourself. A researcher can provide you with stories, that in turn, can get you started on your own path to finding out more about your ancestors.

A professional researcher can also be a consultant to boost your own research. By evaluating the research you have done, a professional can give you guidance on developing your own research plan.

How should a person select a professional researcher?

For the best outcome, do your homework. The researcher’s specialty matters. Specifically, find one who specializes in your ancestor’s locality, culture and language. Google them, looking for articles they might have written or webinars they might have done.

1. Based on your research goal, focus on a researcher’s locality. Can s/he access the original records located at the state and county levels?
2. Ask for a sample of a written work product. All research should include a written report. It is important to know what documentation you will receive and this should be specified in the contact.
3. Have a contract. A professional researcher will offer a contract, which is the beginning of smart and effective communication. The contract will outline the goals and responsibilities of the research. The contract is the beginning of good communication in any professional relationship.
4. Consider the researcher’s certifications and/or experience. A certification or accreditation awarded to a researcher means that the person’s work has been reviewed by peers in a third-party testing process. Educational certificates from genealogical programs are not the same as certifications. An educational certificate shows that the participant has received training. There are many excellent and well-regarded researchers who do not hold certifications, so you will have to judge if they have the specific experience needed to reach your research goal. You can also ask for a resume.

You can find a listing of certified genealogists at the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG) website ) or accredited genealogists through the International Commission for the Accreditation of Professional Genealogists (ICAPGEN) website.  Many professional genealogists advertise through the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) website .

What should the person show the researcher at the beginning of the process?

It is your responsibility to communicate all that you know about the ancestor. Imagine how frustrating it would be to get a report that included facts you already knew!

Be sure that you gather all the information that you have about the ancestor. It is important to show the facts that you know, and how you know them. These facts provide the researcher a smart path to your goal.

Include copies of records you have, and other information you know, such as the ancestor’s location(s), religion and occupation. Stories you have collected are also helpful, as they may lead to records. An example would be disputes that you have heard about; those disputes may have generated court records.

The specific source of all the facts is also important. Be sure that each fact has a corresponding source, showing the record location, book and author(s), and web address (url). For example, if your source is a tree found on Ancestry.com, be sure to give the url of that specific tree.

Include the sources you searched that did not have results for your ancestor (negative results), so you don’t pay the researcher to duplicate what you have already done.

Can it be a lot of work for the client to gather the material and write a report for the researcher?

It is an investment in your time. If you spend time reviewing what you know, you become better educated about your ancestor. When the researcher returns the results, you will be better able to understand them and to make connections between report and other members of your family.

Rebecca is the Program Administrator of the ProGen Study Program, which is an online self-study program to encourage genealogy education, using assignments based on chapters from Professional Genealogy: A Manual for Researchers, Writers, Editors, Lecturers and Librarians, edited by Elizabeth Shown Mills.  If you are interested, the waiting list to begin in a group is between six months and a year. Learn more about the ProGen Study Groups.

To find out about Rebecca’s upcoming classes:

At IGHR: Course 1 Instructor

At GRIP: Military Records course

Rebecca Whitman Koford holds a Certified Genealogist® credential. Her focus is in American research with special emphasis in Maryland and military records of the War of 1812. Rebecca has been taking clients and lecturing since 2004. She has spoken for the National Genealogical Society Conference (NGS), Association of Professional Genealogists Conference (APG), RootsTech (2018), webinars for Legacy and APG, the Maryland State Archives, and for groups in Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and Delaware. Rebecca is the Course I coordinator for The Institute of Genealogical and Historical Research (IGHR). She is a board member of the Maryland Genealogical Society and volunteers at the Family History Center in Frederick, Maryland. She has published articles in the NGS Magazine, APG Magazine, and the Maryland Genealogical Society Journal. She is a graduate and former group coordinator and mentor of the ProGen Study Group, an online peer-led study program based on the book Professional Genealogy by Elizabeth Shown Mills; she was appointed ProGen Administrator in January 2015. Rebecca lives in Mt. Airy, Maryland, with an active teenager and a very patient husband. was appointed ProGen Administrator in January 2015. Her research specialties are: Civil War ; Federal Records ; Land Records ; Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) ; Lineage Societies ; Court Records.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing, Rebecca was not accepting new clients.

Family Trees: Syncing, GEDCOM and Backups

Electronic family trees are a terrific way to capture what you learn about your ancestors. They can help you organize and share what you have found. Once organized, you can analyze what you know and what you need to find.

At a recent class, there were a lot of great questions about family trees. Thinking about family trees, a blog post might help to sort out some of those answers.

While there is a lot to consider about putting a tree online or keeping a family tree on your own computer, there are definitely reasons to do both!

 

Should I backup my online tree?
There is an expectation that an online tree will be backed up by the hosting website. But what if that website gets sold to another company? or undergoes a cyber attack and has a loss of data? or decides that it no longer wants to host family trees?

It is always a good idea to backup your online tree. If you have it on your personal computer, you can still use the tree during a time when you are not connected to the Internet. You also have access to your tree if one of the situations in the above paragraph occurs.

Syncing (synchronizing) the trees online and on a home computer can be thought of backing up the tree.

 

GEDCOMs
You can certainly download a tree from Ancestry.com or FindMyPast.com , and the format will

GEDCOM is an acronym for Genealogical Data Communications (but I have seen it referred to as Genealogical Electronic Data Communications).

Think of this as the most basic, stripped down form of your tree. It includes data about the individuals including sources, and linkages between individuals. In fact, it is a text file that follows the rules of a format that all family tree programs understand. The extension for this type of files is .ged

Imagine you wanted to transfer text from one fancy word processing program to another, but they don’t open each others file format. So, you might decide to save your document as a plain text file, that can be opened by another word processor. Of course, that simple text file would not have all the images you inserted and detailed formating that you might have done in your original.

 

Sync
To synchronize, or sync, means to make your online tree and the one on your computer match.

This comes in handy when you are attaching people, facts and documents to an online tree. That way you can get those additional people, facts and documents into the tree on your computer.

If you have the same tree online and on your computer, you can consider that a backup.

But, some people like me use the online tree to collect data, while the one on my computer has a lot more information, especially about living people. Just be aware whether or not the family tree program on your computer allows you to choose to upload or download your tree from the Internet.

 

Downloading GEDCOMs
For many of your online trees, you have the ability to download a GEDCOM that contains all the people and facts from the tree. Remember, GEDCOMs do not have all the media attached, so you will not get the pictures and documents downloaded.
Note: When there is one tree for everyone on the website, a GEDCOM cannot be downloaded.

Ancestry.com and FindMyPast.com Family Tree -> View all trees next to each of your trees are three buttons: Settings, Export, Delete. You will Export your tree.

 

How-to Information
After the class, one of the attendees and I sat down to look for videos to show how to do all these tasks. Since you know I use Google quite a bit, you will not be surprised to learn that I searched for the following terms:

• download GEDCOM from ancestry
• rootsmagic sync with ancestry
• rootsmagic sync with familysearch

then selected the link to show results in the Video category.

There were how-to videos for all the family tree programs.

 

Good luck and let me know how you do!

 

What WWII Military Ancestors Were Reading

The average American soldier in WWII had an 11th grade education. With a lack of recreation, and a lot of waiting, soldiers needed books. There was an effort by the Victory Book Campaign to furnish soldiers with donated books. These books ended up being heavy and the 18 million books raised were not sufficient.

So, the Council of Books in Wartime went to work to print Armed Services Editions (ASEs). They were light-weight, miniature books designed to fit in uniform pockets. The titles ranged from literature, classics, history, contemporary fiction, humor to career guides. Book contents were reformatted, and printed on lighter magazine pages. For efficiency, the books were printed two titles at a time on the same magazine paper, one on top of the other (“two-up”), and then cut into separate books.

 

 

Soldiers read these books constantly, and credited them for putting them in touch with their own humanity among the horrors of war. Others read history to understand the conflict in which they found themselves. Some books entertained, some books educated. Books were read in transit, while waiting, and recuperating in hospitals. While the First Division waited for a break in the bad weather before D-Day, the soldiers read. It is said that seriously wounded soldiers on Omaha Beach on D-Day were seen propped against the cliffs, reading ASEs as they waited for rescue.

The printing of ASEs continued after the war’s end, for those soldiers serving in the post-war occupation. The final ASEs were printed in September 1947.

An estimated 100 million books in Europe had been destroyed by burning and bombing. The ASEs numbered over 123 million copies of 1,322 titles were printed.

The Library of Congress has a complete set of the 1322 ASE books. There are other large, but incomplete collections.

For a short story of the ASEs, with a list of the ASEs by author listed by author, BOOKS IN ACTION THE ARMED SERVICES EDITIONS.

You can learn more about the subject at Molly Guptill Manning’s website and book, “When Books Went to War.”

One of  the interesting books printed in the format of an ASE was “Returning to Civilian Life”. The interior pages were printed differently than the other ASEs.

 

 

One topic struck me as valuable to us, as genealogists: Record Your Certificate.

 

 

Some of these books are still around. One place you can look for them is ebay. It would be remarkable if, in addition to the stories within their pages, they could tell the stories of where they had been and who had been reading them.

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Rootstech 2018 Videos and Handouts

Rootstech 2018 is over and if you did not make it, you can still view some of the videos and all of the handouts at the link below. It is great that Rootstech lets us all be a part of it.

Videos can be viewed here.

The handouts for the sessions can be viewed and downloaded here.

 

Our Newest Book is Here!

It has been a long time in the works, and the project has kept us busy, but it is finally here.

Using the techniques in the book “Researching Your U.S. WWI Army Ancestors“, the material about the 51st Pioneer Infantry was gathering and combined into a new product.

With Rifle and Shovel:

The 51st Pioneer Infantry Regiment in WWI

is now available on Amazon 

The men of the 51st Pioneer Infantry were mostly draftees. While other soldiers fought with rifles, they used shovels. They also saw combat. As shells went off around them, the pioneers filled holes with rubble collected from destroyed villages. Those roads were the battlefield lifeline, allowing troops and supplies to move forward, while ambulances took the wounded back to hospitals. They cleared the roads that had been booby-trapped by the retreating German Army. They marched at night to hide from the enemy. After the Armistice, they marched into Germany to be part of the Army of Occupation. The Pioneer Infantry provided labor where ever and when ever needed, including guarding railways and bridges, and burying the dead. This book combines information found in archives and a variety of other sources. The material has been blended into a new product that tells the story of the 51st Pioneer Infantry Regiment. It is intended to be both a narrative and a reference for those researching this Regiment.

Contact us to find out about group discounts.