The Dead Librarian
Helping South Carolina family historians find free, online information.
Monday, March 7, 2022
Time Magazine with a SC connection
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
Independent researcher - part two, finding clients
My path to an independent researcher career started before I
retired. Through library networking my
professional contacts included staff at local historical institutions. These
institutions almost always have a “researcher for hire list”. They will not
recommend a researcher, but they will indicate who they know best. I asked two organizations if they would add
me to their researcher list. Because
they knew the level of my research skills, they added me to their list and
steered clients my way. Ninety percent of my referrals come this way, most I don't take on the assignment. For about a year I accepted one or two
clients while I worked full time.
During the pandemic lock-down I decided to retire and take on a few more
clients (Deciding to retire wasn’t as easy as I make it sound!). Thanks to my
current financial circumstances I don’t need another path to acquire new
clients.
While there are enough clients coming to me through historical societies, I did give plenty of thought about ways to get more
clients if I needed them. Feel free to borrow. One idea was
to offer research services to probate attorneys. Genealogy skills are just as useful to locating descendants as they are to finding ancestors. Many attorneys use national
companies that offer research services to locate descendants so there may be
room for a local independent researcher to build up a business in this field. I
also considered offering historic building surveys for companies undergoing
historic building renovations or repurposing. Most businesses are interested in a building’s
history but what research uncovers may also help with tax and zoning
considerations. Offering zoning boards,
chamber of commerce, development offices, etc. examples of a building genealogy
report is one way to start.
As to fees, honestly, my fees are very subjective. For simply scanning projects I will charge
$40.00/hour. For research projects I go down to $30.00/hour. To me it makes better sense to get the higher
amount for projects that will only last a few hours and are off-site. Research projects are always longer lasting
and giving those clients a better hourly rate makes sense if you want the a lasting project to work on at home. I think Ancestry
starts their researcher fees at $35.00/hour.
So, what about researchers-for-hire services? I have applied to a few and have taken clients through the service. On the one hand, it
is nice to have a middleman to handle clients. On the other hand, I found that
I work better talking to clients face to face.
These research services get the client to put their request in one
sentence like, “My ancestor died in 1850 so when was he born?”. How do you answer a question like that
without breaking the client's bank? Those kind of questions can take years to solve! Unless
someone in a different online tree happens to have a document that states a DOB it
would be unlikely a client could afford that kind of research. I like coming to some agreement about expectations first. That isn’t possible through research
services.
Truthfully my clients are mostly interested in historic
research about people or places for writing projects. They want the details of
someone’s life not a multigeneration family tree. However, genealogy research
skills are essential to any historical research. One of the most surprising things
about being an independent researcher is I don’t just research all day. For some clients I am a “sort-of”
administrative assistant in addition to being a researcher. I am asked to prepare charts, spreadsheets, biographical
essays, organize on-site materials (including printing labels!), organize cloud
materials, supervise other researchers, edit writing samples, fact-check, created
bibliographic citations and, of course, prepare summarized research
reports.
In hindsight I can see that a few thoughtful early decisions about my future have landed me in a safe spot, for now!, and I hope it can happen for you, too.
Friday, February 4, 2022
New career - Independent researcher, part one.
Since retiring from public service a year and a half ago I’ve relabeled myself as a self-employed independent researcher. Based on the number of people asking me for advice on being an independent researcher there seems to be a lot of interest in the transitioning process. My path, however, will be different from anyone else, but I can pass on some useful information. Like everyone else my journey started with a curiosity in my family history. I loved the research process and that led me to library school and working in a public library for over twenty years, 12 of those in a local history room. It turns out the research skills learned serving the public are a great foundation for being an independent researcher but someone else may have followed a different path that led them to a similar set of skills.
I like
the term independent researcher because family history is a small part
of what I am hired to research but more about that later. First, some thoughts about the level of research skills an
independent researcher needs to have.
1. 1. . Expert research skills:
Most clients have already used the keyword searchable parts of Ancestry.com so the independent researcher skills need to go beyond keyword searching to include unindexed database/print records, record group searches, historical newspapers, ILL, Wordcat, Hathitrust, government resources, Internet Archive, DPLA, finding aids, print indexes, and more. The list is jargony on purpose. If someone isn’t familiar with the jargon it might be a good place to start beefing up those research skills. Concise writing skills are also important. A business writing class was my way to improve the writing skills needed for client summary reports.
There are ways to improve research skills. Samford Institute or GRIP are immersive research workshops in specific topics and worth every dollar to attend. Volunteering opportunities for research are also available. For example, researching veteran descendants for DNA authentication. Other opportunities can be found by looking through historical society newsletters. A few years ago, through the Southern Association for Woman Historians newsletter, there was a call for volunteers to prepare 300 word biographies of women involved in the US suffrage movement for an Online Biographical Dictionary of the Women's Movement. Working on that project was invaluable. It required researching different resources to come up with enough material to fill a 300 word essay. Here is one I wrote about Virginia Watson Walker.
Because this is “pay by the hour” work researchers have to be efficient in using many different types of records and knowing where those records are kept online or on-site (or efficiently locate those records). Library science theory is founded on five Ranganathan laws. The fourth law, save the time of the user, tweaked a bit, applies to the independent researcher, save the money of your user. The client shouldn’t pay for the time it takes a researcher to learn how to use a resource so be an expert.
I'll start working on a post about getting clients for next week.
Tuesday, August 24, 2021
Richland County Sheriff arrest records: 1959-1963
One of the projects we finished at the library just before
the pandemic shut us down was digitizing and transcribing two Richland
County Sheriff arrest ledgers from 1959-1963.
We found the ledgers as part our efforts to locate historic county records
to process and make available online.
Researchers are often looking for arrest records, but generally when we call for assistance from government offices we get little satisfaction. These ledgers explained some of the
problem. Most of the time when a
researcher is looking for an historic arrest record, they are generally vague
about the arrest details and are not even sure if an arrest occurred. It is usually a family story or a perhaps a
grandparent, aunt or uncle briefly mentioned the event offering few
details. However, in the case of these
ledgers, if you don’t know that an arrest occurred and when it occurred you will
have to go through several ledgers to find the relevant arrest because they are
organized first by date and then by last name.
Also, these ledgers are just a list of arrests. While there is an arrest
number that may lead to more information, no one knows where those records are
kept in Richland County! Of course, the digitizing and transcribing now makes these records keyword searchable,
so the date does not impede the search.
However, this level of access to local records is still rare for
genealogists and the records are difficult for librarians to locate and make
available.
I’ve been thinking about these ledgers a lot lately. Since I last posted in the dead librarian blog the pandemic sped up my retirement plans. After 6 months at home, I knew I wasn’t going back to the 9-5 gig. But I am still working these days, just with private clients instead of the public. My clients now are mostly authors writing books. They often ask me to determine if any arrest records exist from the 1920's-1970's for the subjects of their book. Even if I find the right agency that holds the records very few bureaucrats are willing to conduct the level of research needed for finding local government records and I understand why after working on the Richland County Sheriff arrest ledgers. Local government employees would have to search year by year and without more details from the researcher it is a needle in a haystack. The other problem, of course, is that few government employees know if the records even exist. Deep knowledge of these historic local government records is non-existent.
It is
eye opening to see how inaccessible these public government records are to the
general public. In the case of the Richland County Sheriff records there is certainly a lot of information for individual family researchers but these ledgers also contained a list of arrests made during the historic 1961 Edwards Civil Rights March at the State House. There's a lot of history that we have lost or maybe its' just misplaced.
Thursday, March 19, 2020
Genealogy resources with recent updates.
In case you are finding yourself with time at home explore some of the updated genealogy resources.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Two new upstate indexes.
Thanks to our SC public libraries we have 2 new online indexes for the upstate. First, the Anderson County Library System created a new online obituary index for: The Daily Mail, Anderson Independent and the Anderson Independent-Mail. Presently, the index covers 1950-54, 1980, 2010-2018.
The second index comes from Greenville Public Library and is featured in the Oct/Nov 2019 issue of Internet Genealogy. Called the Upstate Slave Name Index, the index features slave names pulled from probate records across South Carolina’s upstate including these counties: Greenville, Laurens, Pendleton, Anderson and Pickens. Open the file and use the keyword search window or browse. They have been working on this for several years and it is really wonderful to see it up and live!
This a great reminder for us researchers to keep up with what the public libraries are doing for SC research and around the country. It pays to google the nearest public library to the area you are researching and see what they are up to.