Straight answers
Most of these arrive in the first email, and most of them have a real answer rather than a sales answer. Where the honest reply is "it depends", we say what it depends on. Where the honest reply is "probably not", we say that too — it costs us a sale occasionally and saves everyone a wasted year.
Starting out
With the living, not the archives. Write down every name, place and year anyone in the family can produce, however garbled, and record a conversation with the oldest person you have — on an ordinary phone, this month. Then collect the American paper: naturalisation petitions, ship manifests, draft cards, death certificates. One of those almost always names a village. That is the single piece of information that turns a hopeless search into a possible one, and you can find it yourself for free.
Not to begin, but eventually yes. Records in this part of the world were kept by parish and by village, not centrally by surname, so "somewhere in Poland" is not yet a place to search. The good news is that a village name usually survives in a mangled form on an American document, and mangled is workable: a clerk writing what he heard produces predictable distortions, and a place index resolves most of them. Finding the village is often the whole first stage of the work.
Do it yourself for as long as it is fun and the records are indexed and in English. That covers the American side and often gets you to the port of departure. Hire someone at the point where the records are handwritten, in a language you do not read, in a script that is not the one you learned, held in an archive that answers letters in its own language. That is a different job, not a harder version of the same one.
No, and it was never designed to be. A test tells you roughly where your ancestors' population came from and puts you in touch with people who share segments of it. It cannot tell you your great-grandmother's name, which village she left, or why. Those are written on paper. DNA is genuinely useful for confirming or breaking a relationship you already suspect from documents, and for finding cousins who kept a photograph — treat it as a second instrument, not the first one.
Records and handwriting
Usually yes, though rarely the thing you originally wanted. Parish registers were kept in duplicate for much of the nineteenth century, with the second copy sent to the diocese or the county — so the fire that destroyed the church often did not destroy the record. Beyond that there are tax and revision lists, land and cadastral records, school registers, military levy lists, and census household schedules. A burnt parish changes the route, not the destination. What it does change is the cost, because the substitutes are unindexed and have to be read page by page.
Depending on place and decade: Latin, German, Hungarian, Polish, Church Slavonic, and the administrative language of whichever empire held the territory that year. The script is the harder part. German-language records to the 1940s are usually in Kurrent, which shares almost no letterforms with modern handwriting, and older registers use heavy Latin abbreviation. This is why records that are freely available online still go unread: they are public, digitised, and illegible to almost everyone who wants them.
For a rural family in this region, the honest answer is the late 1700s, and with luck a generation or two beyond. Systematic parish registration spreads through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries depending on the denomination and the place, and earlier than that you are in tax rolls and land surveys where households appear without full names. Anyone promising you the Middle Ages for a peasant family is selling something. When a line does go further, it goes further because one specific series survived, and we can show you which.
Almost certainly not. Inspectors at Ellis Island worked from the ship's manifest written at the port of departure; they did not issue names or documents. Names changed later and gradually — a family adapting spelling to English pronunciation, a clerk guessing, a son simplifying what his father wrote. This matters practically: the original spelling is usually recoverable, because the manifest preserves it, and the manifest is the bridge back to the village.
Central and Eastern Europe broadly — the territories of the former Habsburg, Prussian and Russian imperial administrations, which today means Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech lands, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Austria and their neighbours, along with the Jewish communities recorded across all of them. The borders moved repeatedly, so a single village may have its records split between two modern countries; knowing which building to write to is part of what you are paying for. If your family is from somewhere outside that arc, ask anyway — we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people or point you to someone better placed.
Working with us
Ours starts at $190 for archival scouting: we establish which archives hold records for your family's place, what survives and for which years, and whether a full search is worth commissioning. A single traced line with a printed book is $3,400, and a two-line family archive $5,900. The reason serious research is not cheap is that the expensive part is not access — much of it is free — but the hours of a person who can read an unindexed handwritten register and knows which of four archives to write to.
Then we tell you, in writing, with the shelf marks of what we checked, so the next person does not pay to repeat it. If the records for a place did not survive at all and a full search was therefore never possible, we return the fee. We would rather lose a sale than sell a search that cannot work — and the scouting stage exists precisely so that this is discovered for $190 rather than for thousands.
Scouting, a couple of weeks. A full line with the book, several months. That is not padding: archives answer at their own speed, a request to one repository routinely produces a pointer to another, and reading an unindexed register is slow work that cannot be rushed without errors getting into a book meant to outlive everyone in it.
Yes, and this is the usual case, because research does not fit a birthday. The gift is a named certificate, printed and handed over on the day; the work begins when the recipient is ready. In practice this turns out to be better than a finished object, because the recipient becomes part of it — they are asked what they remember, and their own account ends up in the book beside the documents.
A hardcover book about your family, written as prose rather than as a chart, with the documents reproduced in the pages and every statement cited to archive, file and folio so any of it can be checked. A printed family tree for the wall. A private page for relatives in other countries. And the underlying scans and transcriptions, because they are yours.
"How do I know you actually found this?" Ask it of anyone you hire. Every line we write down carries the archive, collection, file and page it came from — not as decoration, but so that a grandchild in thirty years can order the same page and see the same thing. Research that cannot be checked is storytelling with a price tag.
Tell us the surname and the place as your family pronounces it. We will tell you honestly what is likely to survive — before there is anything to pay.
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