Getting ready to take the train from Cork to Dublin to research my Mathews ancestors. Taken in August, 2006.

The stone shown here is in the Pioneer Graveyard in Maysville, Kentucky.

My great-grandmother Louise Grant Smith transcribed the inscription on her great-grandfather’s tombstone as follows:

To  the memory of
NATHAN GULICK
who departed this life
October 2nd, 1826
aged 49 years, 5 months
and 22 days.

His languishing head is at rest,
Its thinking and aching are o’er.
His quiet and immovable breast
is heaved by affliction no more.
His heart is no longer the seat
of trouble and torturing pain.
It ceases to flutter and beat,
It never shall flutter again.

The image shown here was posted to Find A Grave by user Debbie J on October 29, 2009. It’s listed there as memorial #43690720.

On most Mondays, I publish brief e-mail interviews with some of our lookup providers. This week I’d like to introduce you to Melissa Barker, who goes by the username kaitysmom on Genlighten.

From kaitysmom’s profile:

Melissa has been doing Tennessee and Kentucky research for about 20 years. She started her own professional research business in 2004. She does single document retrievals, larger research projects and “everything in between.” She completed the ProGen Study and graduated in 2009 with a certificate.

Nine questions with Melissa:

1)      How did you get started doing genealogy lookups/research?

About 20 years ago I attended a funeral for one of my husband’s ancestors.  While at the visitation there was a lady running around talking to all the family members and writing in this notebook.  I asked her what she was doing and she and I talked for about an hour about genealogy research and I was hooked!!

I don’t give up!  I search every source available to try locate the information that a person is asking for.  Since I have been researching for so long in the Tennessee and Kentucky areas, I have personal knowledge of the records that are available and also records that are not so well known.

Just recently I did a research project for a Client where he wanted me to locate the burial location of his Civil War ancestor.  The ancestor died of disease during the Civil War in Bradley County, Tennessee.  I was able to locate burial records where the ancestor had been buried in Bradley County in 1863 and a year later was disinterred and reburied in the newly formed Chattanooga National Cemetery in Hamilton County, Tennessee in 1864.  I was also able to obtain photos of the ancestors headstone.

A well-formulated query should include the name of the person in question, all dates necessary to complete the request and the specific location where the records should be found.

I conduct most all of my research through the Tennessee State Library and Archives.  This repository is very well known in my area for the amount of information and records they house for all 95 counties in Tennessee.  They also hold a large collection of Kentucky records as well as a large collection of records for all States that adjoin the State of Tennessee.

I use a Epson Perfection V350 Photo Scanner.  This scanner produces very clear scans and my Clients are always impressed with the quality.

My looks ups consist of Tennessee records at this time.  However, I am considering including Kentucky look ups since I do research in Kentucky as well.

Offer look ups in the areas that you are familiar with the records.  Make your turn around time as short as possible.

Riding motorcycles with my husband, reading and writing.

Lookups Melissa Offers

• Tennessee Birth Records, 1908-1912
• Book or Publication Search, years vary
• Tennessee Published Cemetery Records, years vary
• Tennessee Death Certificates, 1908-1958
• Tennessee Deed Record, years vary by County
• Tennessee Marriage Record, years vary by County
• Tennessee Microfilmed Records, years vary by County
• Civil War Service Records, 1861-1865
• Tennessee Obituary, Varies by County
• Tennessee Will and Probate Records, Varies by County
• Tennessee Tax Records, Varies by County

Now fast-forward to March 2010. At this point, given our small userbase, my wife has been able to deal quite effectively with the daily emails and occasional phone calls we’ve received. But over the last few weeks as our traffic has begun to pick up, we’ve seen the volume of customer service inquiries increase right along with it. Several of our experiences with concerned customers have proven quite challenging to deal with, and I like to think we’ve grown as a result. I thought I’d share a few of  the lessons we’ve learned.

Episode #1: Panic Mode

I recently created a new PowerPoint presentation for prospective providers called “Genealogy Lookups 101“. I uploaded it to Slideshare.net,  and posted a link to the slides on our Facebook Fan Page.  Later that night, my daughter sent me an agitated e-mail. Someone was posting on our Facebook wall that our site was a scam, that the records we offered weren’t free like we claimed they were, and that he’d learned that only after wasting $29.95. Since I knew these comments would potentially show up in all our fans’ newsfeeds, I went into panic mode. We don’t ever claim the lookups we offer are free, and we don’t charge subscription fees… nothing on our site is priced at $29.95. What was going on? Who had he mistaken us for?

Guilt By Association

I replied to the poster’s message, asking for details. After some research, it became clear what had happened. Slideshare.net is a little like YouTube. They host the slideshows you upload for free, they ask you to tag your presentations with keywords, and they display Google AdWords ads next to your slides corresponding to the keywords you choose. One of the ads that was being displayed next to my “Genealogy Lookups 101″ slides was for a site that appeared to offer free lookups. As it turns out, our Facebook fan had visited this site several months back, signed up for a $29.95 subscription, and found nothing useful at all — certainly not free genealogy lookups.

So when he saw that ad next to our presentation on our Slideshare.net page, he assumed that the ad was from us, and that we were the ones who’d previously disappointed him. It took some time, but I eventually convinced him that the ads he’d seen didn’t have anything to do with us. After a while, I quietly deleted our message thread from the Fan Page wall. But the damage had been done… a good number of our Fans unsubscribed from our page, presumably lost forever.

The lesson here was clear: wherever we put our content, we need to be conscious of the environment it’ll be placed in. People will associate Genlighten and our brand with the web company we keep. If we’d had a business account on Slideshare, for example, instead of an ad-supported free account, we might have avoided being associated with questionable ads.

Episode #2: Transaction Pending

As part of the checkout process on Genlighten, we reassure clients that their credit cards or PayPal accounts won’t be charged until their lookups are completed. Technically, the process includes these steps:

• The customer clicks on the “Proceed to Checkout” and the “Complete Checkout” buttons
• We submit an “authorization” to the customer’s credit-card issuer to verify that the card is valid and that the payment amount can be successfully charged. At this point the charge should show up on the customer’s credit card as “pending”
• The lookup provider performs the lookup, completes it, and clicks on the “charge client” button
• The earlier “authorization” on the customer’s card is “captured.” This is the moment at which the card is actually charged.

“It’s Deceitful”

Recently a client checked her bank balance and was told that a charge from Genlighten had come through on her debit card. She checked the site and noticed that the lookup was still in process. Perturbed because we had explicitly promised she would not be charged prior to lookup completion, the client called to complain. She liked the site, was pleased with the lookup provider’s efforts, but was NOT happy that we had “deceitful” language in our explanation of the charging process.

I listened, took responsibility for the “you won’t be charged until…” language (I had written it!) and explained that as I understood things, the charge should show as “pending” rather than “cleared.” I offered her a full refund if that wasn’t the case. She agreed to check again with her bank, and that’s how we left things as the call ended.

Welcome News

A few days later, the client e-mailed once more. She’d checked with her bank, and they had clarified what the automated teller had told her earlier: the Genlighten transaction was indeed “pending” rather than “cleared.” Her money was still in her account. She was relieved, and so we’re we. It felt like we’d regained her trust.

Two lessons this time. First: perception is reality. The client felt she’d been deceived, and only once she’d discovered the truth for herself was she convinced otherwise. By listening and offering to make her whole, I motivated her to check the situation out in more detail. If I’d come across defensive, I probably would have lost her for good.

Second: customers read the promises we make and will hold us to them with exactness. In this case, it probably wouldn’t hurt to add some language to the site that explains the possibility that their bank may show their transaction as “cleared” when it’s really still “pending.”

This is What We Signed Up For

When we chose to start a business, we simultaneously chose to face challenges like these. We knew we’d be small and face large well-established competitors. And we decided right from the start that we’d need to differentiate ourselves through our personalized customer service. We’re starting to understand just what we’ve signed up for in that regard.

We want to be like the Founder of Groupon, Andrew Mason. This is what he wrote in a recent blog post about his attitude towards customer service:

I don’t know if it’s some kind of weird complex, but the idea that there’s even one customer out there that is less than thrilled with Groupon horrifies me.

We know that feeling. When things don’t work the way we want on Genlighten and customers are unhappy, it’s hard for us not to take it very personally. Our customer service strategy is simple: keep listening to our customers and work to make Genlighten a little better every day.

1. Dean Richardson

2. David Richardson, born 17 Nov 1935 in Erie, Erie County, PA; died 16 Oct 1998 in Stanford, Santa Clara County, CA

3. Owen Richardson, born 02 Dec 1899 in Baltimore, Baltimore County, MD; died 05 Dec 1993 in Edinboro, Erie County, PA

4. Allen Chapman Richardson, born 18 Jun 1859 in Baltimore, Baltimore, MD; died 21 Dec 1908 in Erie, Erie County, PA

5. Sarah Rogers Merryman, born 03 Oct 1834 in Baltimore county, MD; died 14 Oct 1896

6. Levi Merryman, born Dec 1795 in Baltimore, MD; died in 1868 in Baltimore, MD

At this point, several compiled genealogies and Ancestry Member Trees are able to trace the Merryman line  from Levi back to 1600’s-era England. The image above is from Volume 10 of the Maryland Historical Magazine, p. 298. I haven’t been able to adequately document Levi’s connection to these sources myself yet. As always, I would welcome contact with researchers pursuing this line.

• The frequency of her posting has increased steadily since she began her blog last August. She’s already reached the stage where she’s posting new discoveries and insights daily… that’s a level that it took me a year-and-a-half to attain.
• She’s researching in localities that are of interest to me, like Massachusetts, Kentucky, New York, and Northern Ireland.
• There’s a strong theme of mystery and problem-solving to her posts, which draws me in and makes her narratives entertaining to read.
• Beth’s got plenty of photos and documents to share, including a bunch she brought back from a recent visit to the FHL in Salt Lake. I look forward to hearing more analysis of her finds there.

From her Twitter stream, it looks like Beth’s involved in her local genealogical community as well, volunteering to help a local historical society digitize its photo collection and fulfilling Find A Grave requests.  To me, that sets her apart and makes me even more interested in what she has to say.

I’d encourage you to visit Beth’s blog and peruse her recent posts. You can also follow her on Twitter, where she’s @ResearcherB.

I should have started my company in the Bay Area. It’s too late for me. Save yourself.

That Was Then…

Based on the startup events I’ve attended over the last few months in the Chicago area, and the smart founders I keep running across, we’re starting to make some solid progress in the Midwest. Here are a few anecdotal bullet points to support that assessment:

• The Chicago Tech Meetup held back in January had 170 people attend. Jason Fried of local success story 37Signals was the keynote speaker.
• Recently-launched Chicago startup Groupon is doing spectacularly enough to attract frivolous opportunistic lawsuits.
• Scale Well, a modest source of $1k-sized seed grants to help startups gained traction, just made its first investment.
• ExcelerateLabs, a Chicago-based startup accelerator program akin to TechStars, will have its first run this coming summer. We’re currently working on our application.
• And now we even have our own version of the TechCrunch50: MidVentures25.

[For those who don't share my fascination with the tech startup scene, TechCrunch50 is a startup demo day event held every year in Silicon Valley. Online personal finance website Mint.com launched there in 2007. Genealogy startup Footnote.com launched its "Pages" feature there in 2008.]

This is Now

And guess who will be participating in the inaugural version of MidVentures25? You guessed it, our modest little genealogy startup.

If you’re in the Chicago area, feel free to stop by our booth. The event will be held downtown at 200 S. Wacker Drive, 12th floor, on Thursday March 11th. Registration begins at 5 pm, and things wrap up around 10 pm, but you can show up pretty much anytime in between. The full schedule is here. We’d love to visit with you, answer any questions you might have, practice giving you our elevator pitch, and get your usability feedback and suggestions. Thanks!

I think it speaks for itself.

D’Linton Greenfield, a Rome, Oneida, New York book seller and stationer, was the son of Joseph and Cynthia M. Hubbard Greenfield. According to his obituary (found in a scrapbook at the Rome Historical Society and likely clipped from the Rome Sentinel), he was born in Trenton, Oneida, New York on 25 Jun 1846. D’Linton married Georgianna Schryver in Rhinebeck, Dutchess, New York on 2 April 1885 (again, from a newspaper clipping found in a scrapbook at the Rome Historical Society) and they had one daughter. D’Linton died in 1919 and is buried in Rome Cemetery.

D’Linton is a fascinating name and it doesn’t appear to Google. If you’ve heard it before or know where it might have originated, please let me know.

From McNichollGenService’s Profile

Carolyn’s firm specializes in genealogical document retrieval for Scotland. She has convenient access to all the major Scottish record repositories in Edinburgh. Carolyn is a member of APG, the Society of Genealogists, and the Scottish Genealogical Society, among many others. She’s undertaken genealogical studies through the University of Toronto, the University of Strathclyde, and the University of Dundee.

Nine Questions with Kathy

1)    How did you get started doing genealogy lookups/research?

Genealogical research has always interested me since I was young. Lookups and research are part of my work everyday as a professional genealogist to help others with their own family history since 1994.   Sometimes a person cannot get to go
to a particular facility to obtain a document, and this is where we step into the gap to help.

2)    Do you have a genealogy “superpower”? If so, what is it?

I would say that my “superpower” would be that I cannot let go of something - dogged determination to find the answer to a problem.

3)      Describe a tricky research problem you’re particularly proud of having solved?

A client who could not find the birth of an ancestor in Scotland or Ireland, but I was able to find out that the first name of the person was incorrect in the marriage certificate - the flood gates opened after that.

4)    What are the ideal elements you like to see in a well-formulated lookup request?

Really just to have as much information as possible that a person may know, especially if it is a very common name such as Smith or McDonald, etc.

5)    What’s the most interesting record source or repository you’ve utilized in your area?

The National Archives of Scotland is a fantastic place for all those “non-vital” records.

6)    What technical tools do you use to produce the digital images you provide to clients?

Paintshop Pro, MS Paint, Adobe

7)    Any new lookups you’re considering offering?

None at this time.

8)    What advice would you give to someone who wants to get started as a lookup provider?

I would say go for it.  If you have some experience in your own family history research than you should have a good chance at providing lookups for others.

9)    What other passions do you pursue when you’re not at the archives doing lookups/research?

Hillwalking, Camping, Cooking, Music, Surfing the Web, Reading.

Lookups Carolyn Offers

• Scottish Birth Certificate (Certified Copy), 1855-2010
• Scottish Death Certificate (Certified Copy), 1855-2010
• Scottish Marriage Certificate (Certified Copy), 1855-2010
• Scotland Monumental Inscriptions , 1700-1900
• Scottish Wills and Inventories, 1600-1901
• Scottish Census Returns , 1841-1901
• Scottish OPR Births and Christenings, 1600-1854
• Scottish OPR Marriage Bann, 1600-1854
• Scottish Birth Certificate , 1855-2010
• Scottish Death Certificate , 1855-2010
• Scottish Marriage Certificate , 1855-2010