Janice started her side business from her love of genealogy.
Tell me a little bit about how you got started?
I have been interested in genealogy since I was very young, because my mother and grandmother were always telling stories about the family. After researching my own family for many years, I learned that some people actually did genealogy research for a living. I volunteered to research some friends’ families and still liked doing it, so I put my first ad in a local newsletter in 2005, which garnered me my first client.
Why did you start your Side Business.
I started doing family history research because I enjoy the puzzle-solving aspects: figuring out which family stories are true and which ones might have been “embellished”, making sure that I’ve found the right people and have made accurate connections. As I say on my blog, genealogy is like a jigsaw puzzle, but you don’t have the box top, so you don’t know what the picture is supposed to look like. As you start putting the puzzle together, you realize some pieces are missing, and eventually you figure out that some of the pieces you started with don’t actually belong to the puzzle. I help people discover the right pieces for their puzzles and assemble them into pictures of their families.
How long have you been doing this?
I’ve been researching my own family for 40 years. I’ve been doing work professionally since 2005.
How do you make money (Hourly, By Project, Retainer or One Time Fee)?
I have an hourly rate, because results in genealogy are rarely guaranteed. Records might have been destroyed, they might be missing, they might be extremely difficult to gain access to, and they might
never have been created. Sometimes people lied on records. Some areas are more difficult to research than others, because standardized record-keeping started relatively late. I have spent several hours
searching for someone in a census only to discover that the address I’m looking for was missed by the census taker. Unfortunately, it takes time to learn even a negative answer, and I need to charge for
that time. Always be suspicious of a genealogy researcher who guarantees results.
What Areas of Marketing have worked best for you, for instance Referrals, Social Media, etc?
My best marketing tool is my membership in the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG), which gives me an online profile page. Many of my clients have found me by searching on the APG site
for a researcher in my area or with my skill set. The next important marketing tool has been referrals. My clients pass my name on to their friends who are looking for a researcher.
When do you find the time to work on your side businesses with a full time job and other obligations?
I like to joke that sleep is overrated! I have to keep a detailed schedule so that I know where I’m supposed to be and what I should be doing.
Did you set any business Goals when you started?
When I started doing genealogy research professionally, my main goal was not to lose money! The second goal was to try to build my business to the point that it could support me.
What has been the Best thing that has Happened in your Side Business.
I did some research for a German company that wanted to learn more about the years its founder spent in San Francisco. They wanted the research because they were going to be attending a trade conference in San Francisco and planned to host a party in honor of the company, to which they invited me. They took several of the documents I had found in my research and made big displays of them for the party. It was really gratifying to see my research as such an important part of a celebration.
If you were starting all over again, what would you do differently?
I think I would start a lot earlier. I really love doing this work, and I think my life would have been very different if I had gotten into the field sooner.
How can people find out more about your Business?
People can find me on my blog, http://ancestraldiscoveries.blogspot.com/; my Web site, http://www.ancestraldiscoveries.com/ (currently redirecting to my APG page but soon to be a full-fledged site).
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/AncestralDiscoveries
Google+ : https://plus.google.com/+JaniceSellers/
LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/janicemsellers/
Anything exciting coming up that you would like for us to know about?
I enjoy teaching classes about genealogy, and I have several scheduled already for the year. My calendar is on my blog site at http://ancestraldiscoveries.blogspot.com/p/speaking-calendar.html.
I’m particularly looking forward to the talk on June 14 for the California Genealogical Society, “The Flim-Flam Man: The Con Man Who Helped Discover the East Texas Oil Field.” The research I’ll be
talking about came out of a case I worked on for someone where I was tracing the con man’s descendants. I became absolutely fascinated with the man and have continued doing research on my own. One day I hope to write a book about him.
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