Gary Perlman - Volunteer Amateur Genealogist

This page has links to some genealogy resources that I share with people when I do volunteer research, which typically has a focus on Jewish Genealogy in Montreal. I'm really just an amateur, the self-appointed genealogist for my family, aided sometimes by the experts at the Jewish Genealogical Society of Montreal. I started doing volunteer genealogy research in November, 2014.

• Introduction to my Services
  This is a letter of introduction describing what I do volunteering at the Donald Berman Maimonides Geriatric Centre in Côte St. Luc, Quebec (a suburb of Montreal).
• Volunteer Genealogy Presentation given to the Jewish Genealogy Society of Montreal, April 3, 2017.
• Sources used for Research
  For a year, my research started at a page of resources, but in 2016, I created a Genealogy Dashboard to make it easier to search.
• Family Tree Service Comparison
  This is a rambling comparion of different family tree services, including Geni.com MyHeritage.com and Ancestry.ca (the Canadian version of Ancestry.com).
• Tips for using Geni
  When I answer questions from my clients' family members, I try to record the answer here.

What I've Learned

After dozens of meetings with clients, I think I've learned some lessons worth sharing. They are in no particular order, but start with my interactions with my clients, who generally range in age from their 70's to 90's. They are provided to my by the Therapeutic Recreation department at Maimonides; I don't know the selection criteria, but I think they include high cognitive function. I see each client one-on-one with a computer for about an hour every two weeks.

• I don't come with an agenda. I am directed primarily by my client's interests, privacy concerns, and the flow of discussion. But I do steer the discussion in two specific directions:
  1. I try to get information needed for naturalization file requests as soon as possible because the files take a month to arrive.
  2. I try to get stories about people and places only my clients knew. While it's nice to get all the grandchildren and their cousins documented, they are probably all on the Internet and easy to find. My clients have better recollection of people born over 100 years ago, and they may be the only people with those recollections.
• I prepare for client frailties. Clients vary widely in their mobility, vision, and hearing. I move the screen to the edge of the table so it is closer to the client, and I practice using the accessibility features on the computer, but I also bring a magnifying glass. I've thought about bringing reading glasses, but I would want to get advice on that first. A couple of my clients, over 90 years old, have excellent vision.
• Everything my clients tell me is valuable. I've received lots of information that was not quite right, but it's never been completely wrong. A given name might not be right, but that's because they were known by their Hebrew name, or a nickname based on their Hebrew name.
• My clients sometimes get verklempt. When I find a record with names and signatures, such as a marriage record with birth names of all four parents, or a signature not seen for decades.
• Recent facts are hard to recall, but the deep past is accessible. I've had clients have trouble remembering the names of their grandchildren, but could immediately provide an address where they lived or worked over 50 years ago.
• I bury some personal details. It's very interesting to watch and listen to my clients talk about family members. There are ones they like, and ones they do not, and I hear stories about both. If someone was a good dancer, that might make its way into the Geni tree. If they were terrified of dogs, probably not. (These are just examples. So far, no clients have mentioned any dancing or dogs.)
• My clients like printed documents. Even though we can enlarge documents on the screen, I haven't seen much interest in viewing online documents. They like printed family trees, especially big ones that take several sheets, but I have to take care to keep the fonts large enough for them to read.
• I only spend pocket change on my clients. I did not want my clients to incur any expenses from their family tree research, and I don't want to be in the awkward situation of being owed money. I am able to use my own database subscriptions to Ancestry.ca (Canada) and MyHeritage.com (World) to do their research, and because of the connection between MyHeritage and Geni, I can add information found to their Geni trees. I do splurge $5 for each Access to Information request to Citizenship and Immigration Canada for naturalization file requests, but I've averaged two per client, over ten clients. And I for nice paper for colour printing, and binders to hold the pages.
• I give my clients homework assignments. It might be to get a date, or an email address, but I think they like to contribute.
• Families like to get involved. With the names of just a few family members, it is surprisingly easy to find relatives, on Facebook, in existing family trees, LinkedIn, etc. I contact family members when directed by my client, or when family members contact me. They get excited about the information that is being gathered, and they can add sanity checks and new leads for family members.
• I put my client's information into an online tree at Geni.com. For me, this was an easy decision. Gathering genealogical information is complicated, with people, events, and dozens of documents of each. I've done most of my own family tree work with MyHeritage.com, but I do most of my research with Ancestry.ca, and I keep a presence on Geni.com because people can find me there, and I've found many relatives there. Geni.com make it easy to add a free account, fully accessible on the Web, with just an email address, which I create for my clients on one of my domains. My favourite feature of Geni.com is that my client's tree can merge into other trees, and that has resulted in my clients getting hundreds and even thousands of relatives in their trees. It's a complex and even scary process, but I've been able to bear the brunt of it. I hope that eventually, family members will take over the account, but that's never happened.
• I spend many hours a week on each client. After meeting with a client for an hour, I go back to my own computer and follow up on leads, save more records, organize information, etc. When I start a family tree for a client, I spend 10-20 hours a week on research. It can be incredibly time-consuming, but it's fun, and rewarding, and appreciated.
• There is no end to genealogical research. There are always leads for more relatives and new tricks. And databases get updated, and in some cases, have resulted in a new line of research a year after initial research ended. But at some point, I need to end my participation in a family's tree, and I pass on suggestions for future research.
• I learn a lot while volunteering. I call my sources (mentioned above) my "bag of tricks", and like a magician, I amaze clients and their families by finding records they never knew existed. I find records I never knew existed, or never bothered to look for my own family tree. I think it's the responsibility to my clients that motivates me to use every trick, and to learn new tricks.