I am so fired up right now about the idea of changing the genealogy industry so that we can sell more genealogy products and services to the general public. I think there’s a huge gap with regards to connecting genealogists and people who want to know their family history. I think it’s so important that we try to reframe and repackage genealogy products to make them more user-friendly. People want pretty framed family trees to hang on their wall. They want stories that help their ancestor’s lives come alive. They want pictures and pretty albums.
A Certified Genealogist is trained to adhere to the highest standards of documentation and research. I believe there is still a place for this: such as genealogies that are researched for attorneys for estates and other research with legal implications. I would never doubt the importance or necessity of these processes. In my own educational experience, I have prepared post-graduate documentation and followed rigid rules and processes for sourcing and references. In my heart, I just couldn’t reconcile that idea with people just looking to learn about their family history. The two are incongruent.
I am talking about offering a service that the Certified Genealogist could never offer. I strongly believe that there are tons of people that just wouldn’t be interested in what the Certified Genealogist is selling. The time and precision that goes into creating these genealogies make it out of reach for your average person. It’s too expensive, too academic, and too complicated. We are talking about getting family history information to average people in a fast, efficient, user-friendly way. This doesn’t mean we skimp on quality or accuracy, we are just skipping the minutiae and getting there quicker by using URLs and database links for our sourcing. We are changing the way we present our ancestor trees for documentation. We are making them simple and pretty.
So now that we have that figured out – the real work begins. We put out examples of what those new family histories look like. We work at it until it looks so amazing and so beautiful that our customers won’t be able to resist. We make genealogists available. This means a variety of genealogists, ones who have expertise in the location of our ancestors. That may also mean we have to change genealogists based on the generation of our family tree. We price our services in smaller pieces.
The only way this works is for genealogists to work more collaboratively and less competitively. It has been hard to find work in the past, but once we get this selling of services right, then there will be an abundance of work. That the belief that drives me to continue on with this mission.
The next step in all this is to create more material for ‘teaching’ customers how to purchase services. Within the next week or two, I will be putting out this content in the form of paid advertising. If you are a professional genealogist looking to sell your services, I encourage you to join our network and add your name to the directory. As I get requests for genealogy services, I will refer the services to a genealogist I believe is qualified for the job. Please note the primary qualification is going to be based on location, so be sure to include that if you join the directory.
