You have already done the hard part. Nobody reads it.

A tree is a database. It answers questions nobody in the family is asking. Your nephew does not want to know that Josiah Hale was baptised at St Andrew’s on 4 March 1841 — he wants to know what happened to that family, and a tree cannot tell him because a tree has no sentences in it.

This is the specific job: I take research you have already done and write it into narrative. Not more research. Not a second opinion on your sources. Writing.

The boundary, stated clearly

I am not a genealogist and I will not pretend to be one. I do not do record searches, I do not read seventeenth-century parish hands, and I will not adjudicate a disputed line. If your problem is a brick wall, you need a professional genealogist and I will say so on the call.

My problem is the opposite one: you solved it, and it is sitting in a spreadsheet.

What I do with your research

• Read the whole file — tree, notes, sources, the parts you gave up on.
• Interview you, because a decade of research leaves things in your head that are not in the file.
• Find the structure. Most family lines have two or three real stories in them and a great deal of connective tissue; the writing has to know which is which.
• Write it continuously, with every claim traceable to your sourcing.
• Mark the uncertainty in the prose. “Probably,” “the record does not say,” “two accounts survive and they disagree” — written out, not buried in a footnote.

For societies

Family history societies commission this in two shapes: a thematic volume drawing on several members’ research around one subject — a migration, an industry, a parish, a war — and a workshop that teaches members to write their own findings up. Both are on offer. See speaking for the workshop.