Contact

Every commission starts with a conversation about what you already have and what you want to know.

Write to hello@saltprintchicago.com, or use the form below.

Useful things to include, though none are required to start:

• What you are hoping to find out, in whatever form the question currently takes
• Which family lines, and roughly which places and years
• What you already hold — photographs, certificates, an existing tree, a family account someone wrote down
• Whether you are thinking of a report or a book

What happens next

A conversation, free, about thirty minutes. You describe what you have and what you want to know. I ask a few questions, then tell you plainly how I would go about it — which sometimes means a report before a book, and sometimes means waiting until more of the family material is in your hands.

Then a written scope and a figure. Exactly which lines are covered, what you receive, the price, the timeline, and what is excluded. Nothing is estimated at this stage — the number is the number, and it is fixed before anything is signed.

Then one agreement, signed once. Work begins on the signed agreement, the deposit, and the receipt of the family material already in your hands.

Before you write

Nothing below is required, and a one-line email is a perfectly good place to start.

It is worth knowing that research expenses — certificates, repository copies, archive fees — are billed at cost with no markup, and pre-approved above a threshold set in your agreement. And that difficult findings are a conversation held before research begins, not after: family history turns up illegitimacy, institutionalization, crime and children who did not survive, and it is better to decide in advance how you want that handled.

Questions answers most of the rest.