If you’ve ever accidentally burned a Tuesday night digging through old census records because you couldn’t figure out why your great-aunt moved to Kansas, you’re already qualified for this.
People are weirdly hungry right now to figure out where they came from, and most of them get stuck almost immediately, not because the information doesn’t exist, but because they don’t know a passenger manifest from a draft card and they’ve got a day job.
That gap is the business…
You don’t need a genealogy certification, you need patience and the willingness to squint at bad handwriting for a couple hours.
The interesting thing about this side hustle is, nobody’s paying you for research, really. They’re paying so they can stop thinking about it.
So don’t pitch “I do genealogy research,” pitch the relief. And keep your first few offers small.
Skip the “I’ll build your whole tree back to the 1200s” pitch, that’s how you end up working sixty hours on a $150 job and hating your life. Instead, take one stuck question at a time.
Someone hands you a name and a birth year they’re not even sure is right, and you spend two focused hours seeing what turns up. Or you fix their messy tree, the one with three duplicate great-grandpas because they merged two Ancestry hints wrong.
You genuinely don’t need much to start…
A laptop and somewhere to keep notes gets you through your first handful of jobs. I’d hold off on paying for Ancestry or Newspapers.com until you’ve got a client actually asking for it, because in the beginning your time is worth more than another subscription sitting unused.
On pricing, don’t overthink it.
Somewhere between $25 and $60 an hour is normal depending on how much experience you’ve got, or just package it flat: two hours for $99, three hours for $149 if it’s a real brick-wall problem.
Set expectations early, though, because people think you have a secret master database somewhere. Half the time you’re just squinting at someone’s terrible 19th-century cursive trying to figure out if that’s a J or an I.
You can skip building a website and fighting for scraps on Fiverr, at least at first. Local Facebook history groups are where this actually happens.
There’s always some retired guy asking if anyone knows how to read a 1910 draft card, or someone trying to figure out why their great-grandmother’s name is spelled three different ways across four documents.
Answer a few of those for free, mention you do this for money, and you’ll have your first client inside a week.
Get the basics before you start: full names, maiden names if you can get them, rough dates, and whatever they already have sitting in a shoebox somewhere.
Get paid upfront for the first two hours, hand over whatever you find in a plain Google Doc, and go from there.
It really is that simple to set this side income up. It’s cheap to set up, simple to do, and it’s a topic that’s in high demand right now. Start it today and see for yourself.
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