Before the repairman comes to do any work in the house, I always make certain everything is “cleaned up and out of his way.” There’s no need to pay a plumber to clean out under the kitchen sink to reach the garbage disposal when I can do that myself.
It’s the same with hiring a professional genealogist.
Before someone else can work on your problem, they will need to organize and “clean up” what you have already obtained. That organization of information is something you can do yourself and is preferred to simply sending the researcher a random collection of documents. If the researcher you hire has to organize our information before he can even begin, you will be charged for the time spent organizing your unorganized information.
After all, if it takes the plumber half an hour to get to your clogged drain because you couldn’t clean out around it, you’ll be billed for that time.
Sometimes when you organize your information you realize that you don’t need a professional. Unfortunately it doesn’t often work that way with the plumber.
One response
Now with this my question is how would you organize the information you send? Like for me I have my records organized by surname then family group and my documentation by for the most part date year as if looking at them on a timeline would this suffice or is there a better way to organize the information ? I know from looking on the net that there are twice as many ways to organize ones files than there are genealogists.