Ancestry.com's Expert Connection Program Ends

Today, February 3, 2001, Ancestry.com's "Expert Connect" program came to an end. I was a member of that program, as one of Ancestry's experts, and maintained a 5-star ranking from start to end. I enjoyed working with all of my clients there and have established relationships with most that have led to repeated projects. This was Ancestry's final comment, posted on their site.

Expert Connect - Service to be discontinued

Since launching in the summer of 2009, Expert Connect has been a great place to find clients.

However, Ancestry.com has decided to streamline the business, and as of March 18, 2011, Expert Connect will no longer be a service that Ancestry.com will offer to its members. We expect that many of you may still be working on current projects with clients that have come through the Expert Connect service. We fully encourage you to finish out these projects over the coming months, and if needed, continue relationships with the clients you have made connections with along the way.

We thank you for your involvement in Expert Connect and for sharing your expertise with Ancestry.com customers.

Today, February 3, 2011, I created this blog. When I joined Expert Connect, I thought the label "expert" was a little pompous. Even though I was a frequent user of Ancestry's database through my work and a long time genealogist, I was reluctant to think of myself as an expert in a field where there are so many more knowledgeable people. Over the time that I participated in the Expert Connect program, I began to realize that I was what they had labeled me, an expert. I was already a successful professional genealogist, having worked for over 22 years as a genealogist and private investigator for an international probate firm that located "missing heirs". One of the best sources for our company was Ancestry.com. In the competitive business of locating missing heirs, we were early users of Ancestry, and often found that as they added material to the enormous amount of information they provided, often, we still couldn't find records we knew must be there.

Over the years we studied how Ancestry's search engine worked, how the databases interconnected (and how some didn't), and we developed search techniques and procedures that allowed us to achieve a higher percentage of successful results. When I retired, and started my own genealogical research business, based in Philadelphia, I joined Ancestry's Expert Connect and found that many of their members were not having success finding what they wanted to find on the website. Many of the projects I was asked to work on, were solved by locating information on Ancestry's database, information my clients couldn't locate on their own.

I created this blog to help genealogists and family historians achieve better results when searching Ancestry.com's databases.  I'll be providing tips and tricks that any one can use to find what is there.