The book Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist’s Guide, is another excellent book for your personal genealogical library. Written by Diana Elder and published in 2018, this is the book you want if you wish to take your genealogy research skills to the next level. The information in this book is made to take you from novice to professional in your skill level, whether you take up genealogy as a career or keep it as a hobby or personal calling. This book even has some things to teach you if you are already researching at a pro-level.
If you are stuck in your genealogy work in some way, such as wondering how to get past a family tree brick wall, this is the book you need. Since every genealogist occasionally comes across a brick wall, unless they are exceptionally lucky and from an extraordinarily well-documented (i.e., probably famous) family, this book can help virtually any genealogy on their research journey. This is the definitive guide for solving challenging genealogy issues. That it is done in a step-by-step method that uses real world examples only makes the book more useful to genealogists of all levels.
While this book can definitely be useful for beginners, it is truly written to take the experienced researcher up those notches that they need to. This book teaches you to form a research objective, to review your research by making a timeline analysis, to make a locality guide that you will use to direct your research, to create a research plan, to style your source citations like a pro (so no one can question the validity of your research, and so other researchers can use your sources to guide their own work), to set up a research log so you can organize and track your progress (and to make sure you don’t repeat searches), and to write reports that detail your findings and ideas for future research projects on your family tree. There are even work samples and templates included in the book. How’s that for a comprehensive how-to research guide?
Most genealogists who are serious about their work want to improve on their skills and become the best genealogists they can be. Their practice of genealogy isn’t just a hobby, but a passion and a calling. If you are among those who want to become a winning genealogist, even if you’re only competing against yourself, this is the book for you. Even if you are a beginning genealogist, get this book and keep it aside for the time when your skills have become strong and you’ve become confident in your abilities, then use it to take you to even greater genealogical heights with new skills and techniques. The author of this book is an experienced genealogist, and it is clear that she wants all of her readers to be just as successful at it as she is. If this is you, this is your book.