By Andre Bagley, AG®
Ask someone to describe a genealogist at work and you may hear a variation of the same scene every time: a dim archive, a magnifying glass, their carefully contained excitement when a name rises out of a crumbling ledger. It happens. But it’s maybe only a few minutes of any eight-hour day, and it isn’t where the day starts.
My day starts with more mundane things. Before I open a single record, I check to see where the accounts stand. Payments received are recorded and payments still outstanding may need follow-up. Then I open the spreadsheet that ranks my active projects and suggests how many hours each should get. A solo practice means you’re the bookkeeper and the operations manager before you’re the genealogist. The craft sits on top of a business that must be run.
Next comes the part I used to dread: the phone—and the clock. A new inquiry is perishable. The odds of reaching someone drop sharply within the first couple of hours and keep falling; a lead you sit on for two days is usually gone. So, unless I’m booked solid, a fresh one gets a fast response—ideally a live call, because voice is the only channel that tells you whether a person is serious. Most calls go to voicemail; I leave one and follow with a short email and text pointing them to my scheduler.
That scheduler runs off the same calendar I live in, and it quietly does more than book appointments. It ends the tedious “what time works for you?” volley; here are my open slots, pick one, no fuss. And it lets me guard my own time: if I want a block for focused research, I claim it before anyone can step on it.
For the strong prospects, the conversation moves fast. For everyone else, I lean on the cleanest filter I’ve found. After the free consultation, the next step is a paid premium consultation—a micro-commitment.
It does two things at once. First, it compensates me for the hours I’d otherwise spend drafting a proposal and paperwork for someone who may never order. I watched a former employer give this away constantly and I figured there had to be a better way. Second, it answers, faster than any conversation can, the only question that matters: is this person serious? Pay it, and they almost always sign. Decline it, and the silence is its own clean answer—no chasing required. It’s fully refundable if they change their mind in writing within thirty days, and it rolls into their deposit if we go forward. (When someone genuinely can’t afford it, I point them to free resources— FamilySearch centers and the like—rather than take their money.) The day a prospect pays that fee is the day I assign them a client number, because that’s the moment they stop being a maybe. Warm intentions are easy; in my experience they don’t mean much until someone puts money behind them.
Then I get to the part people imagine. I pick the project highest on the list and dig in. Here’s what nobody tells you: the research is mostly judgment, not discovery; whether two records describe the same person, whether an absence means something, where the evidence points. A search that finds “nothing” still produces a result: proof that a record doesn’t exist or didn’t survive. Explaining what that absence means, in writing, is the deliverable. Genealogical proof doesn’t exist until it’s on paper.
When there’s time, I write—pieces like this one. Visibility compounds quietly; even the AI tools people now ask for recommendations tend to surface the professionals who publish real, findable work.
Some days get broken up by other professional work that levels out a variable income. And I stop at five—not because the work is finished, but because my family is counting on me to stop. Knowing when to close the laptop is part of the job, too.
The honest day is more interesting than it sounds: run the business, work the phone, exercise judgment, write it down—and come home. What makes it more interesting than it sounds is everything underneath the routine. Every name on that priority list belonged to a real person who lived a real life, and all the mundane machinery—the bookkeeping, the calls, the careful weighing of evidence—exists to serve one quiet, recurring moment: the moment the records hand someone their family back. That moment is rare. It is also the whole reason for the rest of the day.
Read the full article, “What a Genealogist Actually Does All Day” at Find My Family Genealogy.
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