How to Choose a Jewish Genealogist: Questions to Ask Before You Hire
Most families hire a genealogist once.
There is no second attempt, no accumulated experience, no instinct built up over years of dealing with the profession. You make the decision from a position of almost total information asymmetry and you make it about something that matters to you far more than the fee suggests.
This is a guide to asking better questions. Some of the answers below are ours. Most of them are not about us at all.
This is a guide to asking better questions. Some of the answers below are ours. Most of them are not about us at all.
The Choice Matters More Than It Looks
A poor researcher does not usually produce a wrong answer. A poor researcher produces a thin one.
You receive a document that looks like scholarship. It has a family tree, a few scanned records, some historical context about the city your grandparents came from. Nothing in it is false. And yet three generations back the line simply stops, with no explanation of why: whether the records were destroyed, whether they were never created, whether they exist but sit in an archive nobody visited, or whether the researcher looked in one place, found nothing, and moved on.
You will not be able to tell the difference. That is the entire problem. A report that stops at 1870 because the records burn out at 1870 and a report that stops at 1870 because the researcher stopped at 1870 look identical to the person paying for it.
There is a second cost, and it is the one families feel later. Heritage research is often commissioned at a specific moment: a parent's illness, a milestone birthday, a grandchild starting to ask questions, a trip already half-planned. That moment does not repeat. A thin report does not just waste money. It closes a door, because most families conclude that the research was done and there was nothing more to find.
You receive a document that looks like scholarship. It has a family tree, a few scanned records, some historical context about the city your grandparents came from. Nothing in it is false. And yet three generations back the line simply stops, with no explanation of why: whether the records were destroyed, whether they were never created, whether they exist but sit in an archive nobody visited, or whether the researcher looked in one place, found nothing, and moved on.
You will not be able to tell the difference. That is the entire problem. A report that stops at 1870 because the records burn out at 1870 and a report that stops at 1870 because the researcher stopped at 1870 look identical to the person paying for it.
There is a second cost, and it is the one families feel later. Heritage research is often commissioned at a specific moment: a parent's illness, a milestone birthday, a grandchild starting to ask questions, a trip already half-planned. That moment does not repeat. A thin report does not just waste money. It closes a door, because most families conclude that the research was done and there was nothing more to find.
What You Are Actually Buying
It helps to be precise about the product, because the word "genealogy" covers at least four different services sold at similar prices.
Some firms sell record retrieval: you name the town, they pull what has been digitized and hand it to you. Some sell compilation: they assemble what is publicly available online into an attractive narrative. Some sell archival research: someone physically enters a repository, reads unindexed handwritten material, and reconstructs a family from primary sources. And some sell heritage travel built on top of research. The ability to stand in the room where it happened.
All four are legitimate. They are not interchangeable, and they should not cost the same. Most disappointment comes from paying for the third and receiving the first.
Some firms sell record retrieval: you name the town, they pull what has been digitized and hand it to you. Some sell compilation: they assemble what is publicly available online into an attractive narrative. Some sell archival research: someone physically enters a repository, reads unindexed handwritten material, and reconstructs a family from primary sources. And some sell heritage travel built on top of research. The ability to stand in the room where it happened.
All four are legitimate. They are not interchangeable, and they should not cost the same. Most disappointment comes from paying for the third and receiving the first.
Questions Worth Asking
Bring these to any consultation, with any firm, including ours.
1. Do you work on the ground, or online?
Ask where the researcher physically is. Ask when they were last inside the archive relevant to your family. Working online is not disqualifying, a great deal of serious work begins there, but a researcher who has never entered an Italian reading room cannot tell you what is on the shelves that is not in the catalogue.
2. Which archives can you actually enter and which are already open to anyone?
This question separates knowledge from marketing faster than any other.
Italian state archives are, by law, freely consultable. Under Article 122 of the Code of Cultural Heritage, documents held in state archives are open to the public, with three timed exceptions: fifty years for material formally classified as relating to state policy, forty years for documents containing sensitive personal data, a category that expressly includes racial and ethnic origin and religious affiliation, and seventy years for data revealing health, sexual life, or confidential family relationships.
Two consequences follow. First, no one can sell you exclusive access to a state archive, because you already have it. Second, the documentation of the 1938 racial laws and the years that followed is long past its forty-year restriction and is not the closed material people assume it is.
Where access genuinely differs is elsewhere: in the private archives of the Jewish communities themselves, in communal registers, in the papers of institutions that are under no obligation to admit anyone. A researcher who claims special access should be able to say precisely which archives they mean, and on what basis.
3. What credential do you hold, and who issued it?
Genealogy is not a licensed profession: not in the United States, not in Italy, not in Israel. Anyone may use the title. What exists instead is voluntary credentialing, and the distinctions matter:
No body anywhere certifies expertise in Jewish genealogy specifically. If someone claims such a credential, ask who issued it.
4. What languages and scripts can you read?
Not speak. Read. Italian-Jewish research can require Italian, Latin, Hebrew, and occasionally Judeo-Italian dialect within a single family file, in handwriting that changes by century and by clerk. A researcher who works through translators is working with a delay and a filter at every step.
5. What happens if you find nothing?
Ask this before you ask about price. The answer tells you almost everything.
An honest researcher will say, without prompting, that a negative outcome is possible and will then tell you exactly what you receive if it occurs. A vague or reassuring answer here is the single most reliable warning sign in the entire conversation.
6. What, physically, will I receive?
Page count is meaningless. Ask about structure. Will sources be cited in a form that lets another researcher verify them? Will conclusions be separated from inferences? When the evidence is incomplete, will the report say so in writing, or will it round up?
7. Who does the work?
The person selling is not always the person researching. That is normal and often necessary. What is not normal is being unable to find out. You are entitled to know who will enter the archive, where they are based, and what qualifies them.
8. What will you not do?
Every researcher has limits: regions they do not know, periods they do not work in, claims they will not make. A researcher who has no limits has not been working long enough to find them.
1. Do you work on the ground, or online?
Ask where the researcher physically is. Ask when they were last inside the archive relevant to your family. Working online is not disqualifying, a great deal of serious work begins there, but a researcher who has never entered an Italian reading room cannot tell you what is on the shelves that is not in the catalogue.
2. Which archives can you actually enter and which are already open to anyone?
This question separates knowledge from marketing faster than any other.
Italian state archives are, by law, freely consultable. Under Article 122 of the Code of Cultural Heritage, documents held in state archives are open to the public, with three timed exceptions: fifty years for material formally classified as relating to state policy, forty years for documents containing sensitive personal data, a category that expressly includes racial and ethnic origin and religious affiliation, and seventy years for data revealing health, sexual life, or confidential family relationships.
Two consequences follow. First, no one can sell you exclusive access to a state archive, because you already have it. Second, the documentation of the 1938 racial laws and the years that followed is long past its forty-year restriction and is not the closed material people assume it is.
Where access genuinely differs is elsewhere: in the private archives of the Jewish communities themselves, in communal registers, in the papers of institutions that are under no obligation to admit anyone. A researcher who claims special access should be able to say precisely which archives they mean, and on what basis.
3. What credential do you hold, and who issued it?
Genealogy is not a licensed profession: not in the United States, not in Italy, not in Israel. Anyone may use the title. What exists instead is voluntary credentialing, and the distinctions matter:
- The Board for Certification of Genealogists is a certifying body rather than a membership society. It evaluates a portfolio of actual client-quality work and awards the Certified Genealogist credential, with optional add-on credentials for lecturing and for genetic genealogy. Credentials are renewed on a five-year cycle.
- ICAPGen awards the Accredited Genealogist credential through written and oral examination in a specific region. Italy is one of its testing regions, which makes it directly relevant here.
- The Association of Professional Genealogists is a membership organization and issues no credential at all. Members agree to a code of ethics, complete continuing education, and pay dues. Their skills are not tested. Membership signals participation in the profession, not verified competence a distinction the association itself does not hide, but which marketing copy frequently blurs.
No body anywhere certifies expertise in Jewish genealogy specifically. If someone claims such a credential, ask who issued it.
4. What languages and scripts can you read?
Not speak. Read. Italian-Jewish research can require Italian, Latin, Hebrew, and occasionally Judeo-Italian dialect within a single family file, in handwriting that changes by century and by clerk. A researcher who works through translators is working with a delay and a filter at every step.
5. What happens if you find nothing?
Ask this before you ask about price. The answer tells you almost everything.
An honest researcher will say, without prompting, that a negative outcome is possible and will then tell you exactly what you receive if it occurs. A vague or reassuring answer here is the single most reliable warning sign in the entire conversation.
6. What, physically, will I receive?
Page count is meaningless. Ask about structure. Will sources be cited in a form that lets another researcher verify them? Will conclusions be separated from inferences? When the evidence is incomplete, will the report say so in writing, or will it round up?
7. Who does the work?
The person selling is not always the person researching. That is normal and often necessary. What is not normal is being unable to find out. You are entitled to know who will enter the archive, where they are based, and what qualifies them.
8. What will you not do?
Every researcher has limits: regions they do not know, periods they do not work in, claims they will not make. A researcher who has no limits has not been working long enough to find them.
Red Flags
Guaranteed results. No one can promise to find a great-grandparent, because no one knows in advance whether the record survived. The APG code of ethics requires members to represent their abilities and services honestly and to avoid misleading or exaggerated statements. It is a standard worth applying to any firm, member or not.
Vagueness about people. "We have specialists across the country" is not an answer. Names, cities, and qualifications are.
Claimed exclusivity over public archives. As above: if it is a state archive, the access is yours already.
A single price for an unknown problem. Nobody can responsibly quote a full research project before establishing what survives for that family in that province. A staged approach a preliminary assessment first, a full project only if the assessment justifies it. It protects you, not the firm.
Template reports. Ask whether the historical context in your report is written for your family or assembled from a library of city descriptions. Both exist in this market.
A checklist where the firm scores perfectly. Including this one. Any comparison guide published by a service provider is shaped by that provider's strengths. Read ours with that in mind.
Vagueness about people. "We have specialists across the country" is not an answer. Names, cities, and qualifications are.
Claimed exclusivity over public archives. As above: if it is a state archive, the access is yours already.
A single price for an unknown problem. Nobody can responsibly quote a full research project before establishing what survives for that family in that province. A staged approach a preliminary assessment first, a full project only if the assessment justifies it. It protects you, not the firm.
Template reports. Ask whether the historical context in your report is written for your family or assembled from a library of city descriptions. Both exist in this market.
A checklist where the firm scores perfectly. Including this one. Any comparison guide published by a service provider is shaped by that provider's strengths. Read ours with that in mind.
Green Flags
Named institutional relationships. Not "connections" but agreements, with communities and repositories that can be identified.
Volunteered limits. A researcher who tells you what may not be findable before taking your money is telling you the truth in the one moment when lying is most profitable.
Willingness to walk you through report structure before you commit — how sources are cited, how uncertainty is expressed, how a conclusion is worded when the evidence is partial.
Refusal to overstate a surname. A surname indicates a research direction. It does not confirm descent. Any researcher who tells you what your name proves before entering an archive is selling something other than research.
A clear statement of what happens when nothing is found, in writing, before payment.
Volunteered limits. A researcher who tells you what may not be findable before taking your money is telling you the truth in the one moment when lying is most profitable.
Willingness to walk you through report structure before you commit — how sources are cited, how uncertainty is expressed, how a conclusion is worded when the evidence is partial.
Refusal to overstate a surname. A surname indicates a research direction. It does not confirm descent. Any researcher who tells you what your name proves before entering an archive is selling something other than research.
A clear statement of what happens when nothing is found, in writing, before payment.
Why an Archivist in the Room Is Not an Online Subscription
Italy has done more digitization than almost any comparable country. The Portale Antenati has published close to 155 million documents from the state archives, free to consult, with the campaign still running after more than a decade. It is a genuine public good and any competent researcher uses it daily.
It is also widely misunderstood, in two specific ways.
First, the digitized civil registers are largely not the historical archives of the municipalities. They are, for the most part, the second copies sent by each comune to the competent tribunal and later transferred to the state archives. When the state archive never held records for a given town, they are not on the portal, you have to write to the comune. Second, publication is ongoing and uneven: a town whose registers exist but have not yet appeared is not a town without records.
Then there is everything that was never in the system to begin with. Communal registers held by the Jewish communities themselves. Notarial acts, in which Jewish families appear constantly and which are catalogued by notary, not by name. Ghetto-era administrative papers. Prefecture files. Records held by institutions that digitize on their own timetable. Florence's communal archive, damaged in the 1966 flood of the Arno and restored over decades, is scheduled to come online sixty years after the water.
And beyond all of it: an image online is not a readable record. Most of this material is unindexed, which means it cannot be searched by name, only read, page by page, by someone who can read it.
It is also widely misunderstood, in two specific ways.
First, the digitized civil registers are largely not the historical archives of the municipalities. They are, for the most part, the second copies sent by each comune to the competent tribunal and later transferred to the state archives. When the state archive never held records for a given town, they are not on the portal, you have to write to the comune. Second, publication is ongoing and uneven: a town whose registers exist but have not yet appeared is not a town without records.
Then there is everything that was never in the system to begin with. Communal registers held by the Jewish communities themselves. Notarial acts, in which Jewish families appear constantly and which are catalogued by notary, not by name. Ghetto-era administrative papers. Prefecture files. Records held by institutions that digitize on their own timetable. Florence's communal archive, damaged in the 1966 flood of the Arno and restored over decades, is scheduled to come online sixty years after the water.
And beyond all of it: an image online is not a readable record. Most of this material is unindexed, which means it cannot be searched by name, only read, page by page, by someone who can read it.
How We Answer These Questions
On the ground. We maintain in-house archivists in Florence and Venice, and engage vetted local specialists by case in other regions.
On access. We hold partnership agreements with the Jewish communities of Rome, Florence, and Venice. We do not claim privileged access to state archives, because none exists.
On credentials. We will name the individual, the institution, and the document on the call, not in a brochure.
On languages. Our work is conducted in English, Italian, Hebrew, Spanish, French, and Russian. Our founder is currently completing graduate studies in Jewish Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
On finding nothing. La Ricerca, our preliminary archival assessment, is $950 and is not refundable, because the work is performed whether or not it produces a name. What you receive if the outcome is negative is a full accounting of that work: the list of every archive and fond queried, the official written responses from those institutions that issue them, and a signed research conclusion setting out what was searched, what was lost, and where the line now sits. The full $950 credits toward L'Archivio if you continue within ninety days. A documented negative result is not a failed project. An undocumented one is.
On access. We hold partnership agreements with the Jewish communities of Rome, Florence, and Venice. We do not claim privileged access to state archives, because none exists.
On credentials. We will name the individual, the institution, and the document on the call, not in a brochure.
On languages. Our work is conducted in English, Italian, Hebrew, Spanish, French, and Russian. Our founder is currently completing graduate studies in Jewish Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
On finding nothing. La Ricerca, our preliminary archival assessment, is $950 and is not refundable, because the work is performed whether or not it produces a name. What you receive if the outcome is negative is a full accounting of that work: the list of every archive and fond queried, the official written responses from those institutions that issue them, and a signed research conclusion setting out what was searched, what was lost, and where the line now sits. The full $950 credits toward L'Archivio if you continue within ninety days. A documented negative result is not a failed project. An undocumented one is.
Before You Hire Anyone
You are not obliged to be an expert in this. You are only obliged to ask, and to notice whether the answers are specific.
The researchers worth hiring will welcome the questions, because specificity is the one thing that cannot be improvised. The ones who cannot answer will tell you so in the way they change the subject.
Bring these questions to a free consultation with us. Ask all of them. We would rather lose a project to an honest answer than win one on a vague one.
The researchers worth hiring will welcome the questions, because specificity is the one thing that cannot be improvised. The ones who cannot answer will tell you so in the way they change the subject.
Bring these questions to a free consultation with us. Ask all of them. We would rather lose a project to an honest answer than win one on a vague one.
If your family name was spoken in Ferrara, the community's own archive may not hold it. The city's does.
Radici traces Italian-Jewish families through the archives where the records actually survive — municipal, state, notarial and communal — and takes families to the streets those records describe. Begin with La Ricerca, a preliminary archival assessment that tells you honestly what can and cannot be found.
