Make a Living Not a Killing: How I Approach Genealogy at Genealogy Bargains

Hi. I’m Thomas MacEntee. If you’ve spent any time chasing down ancestors, you already know the feeling. That little jolt when a name finally matches a date. The frustration when a brick wall stares back at you for the hundredth time. I’ve been living in that feeling for decades, and somewhere along the way I turned it into a job. Genealogy Bargains is the result.

So what is this place, exactly?

What Genealogy Bargains actually is

At its core, this site exists to teach. I write about US record sets — the ones people overlook, the ones that crack cases wide open. Twentieth-century vital records are a favorite of mine. Birth, marriage, and death certificates from the 1900s feel modern, almost too recent to matter. They matter enormously. A 1924 death certificate can hand you a mother’s maiden name, a cause of death, a birthplace, and the name of the informant who reported it — usually a relative standing in a funeral home, grieving, answering questions. Four generations in one document. People walk right past those records because they assume “recent” means “easy.” It rarely does.

I also write about research methodology. How to read a census sideways. When to trust an index and when to go hunting for the original image. And I write family story prompts, because here’s something I believe down to my bones: a sourced fact without a story attached to it eventually gets forgotten.

Now, the part everyone wants to ask about.

How I keep the lights on

Yes, this is a business. I’m not shy about that. Affiliate relationships with vendors like Ancestry.com and MyHeritage help fund the free education I put out. When you follow a link here and subscribe or buy, I may earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you. The same goes for the Amazon links scattered through my articles, including links to the 50-plus genealogy books I’ve written over the past ten years.

Here’s the phrase I keep taped to the inside of my skull: I want to make a living in genealogy, not a killing.

What does that mean in practice?

It means I won’t bury you in upsells. It means the education comes first and the sales pitch comes second, and if I ever flip that order, something has gone wrong. I’ve seen what the other approach looks like. Wall-to-wall affiliate banners. “Limited time!” screaming from every paragraph. Content written to rank, not to teach. That model treats you like a wallet. I’d rather treat you like a researcher who happens to occasionally need a DNA kit or a good reference book.

The cheat sheets — and why they’re free

I’m excited to announce a brand-new FREE resource from Genealogy Bargains: the Finding Female Ancestors Genealogy Cheat Sheet, a 17-page reference guide packed with practical strategies, record sets, research tools, and step-by-step guidance designed to help you break through exactly this kind of brick wall.

You can grab your free copy right now at https://genealogybargains.com/CS-females.

I’m excited to announce a brand-new FREE resource from Genealogy Bargains: the Finding Female Ancestors Genealogy Cheat Sheet, a 17-page reference guide packed with practical strategies, record sets, research tools, and step-by-step guidance designed to help you break through exactly this kind of brick wall.

You can grab your free copy right now at https://genealogybargains.com/CS-females.

Let me tell you about a woman named Carol. (Name changed, but this happened.)

Carol emailed me about her great-grandmother. Dead end. The woman appeared in one census as a married adult and then nothing before that. No maiden name. No parents. The kind of wall that makes you want to close the laptop and take up gardening instead.

I’d just finished my Finding Female Ancestors Genealogy Cheat Sheet — 17 pages on the specific problem of women who vanish into their husbands’ surnames. Carol worked through it. Marriage records. Church baptisms. Probate files where a father names his married daughters. Three weeks later she sent me her great-great-grandmother’s full maiden name, pulled from a will that listed “my daughter Margaret, wife of John.”

That’s the whole point of the free downloads. They aren’t bait. They’re tools.

The Finding Female Ancestors Genealogy Cheat Sheet is available for download starting Friday, June 5, 2026, and it joins a growing library of free guides on the topics that trip researchers up most. More are coming. Female ancestors, immigration records, citing sources properly — the stuff that separates a shoebox of clippings from a documented family history.

Why source citations keep coming up

You’ll notice I harp on sources. A lot.

There’s a reason. Genealogy without citations is just storytelling with confidence. I push hard on social media for conversations about where our field is heading — artificial intelligence in research, evolving methodologies, the tools that are reshaping how we work. AI is a remarkable assistant. It is a terrible witness. Ask it who your third-great-grandfather married and it may happily invent someone. So I keep dragging every conversation back to the same place: show me the record. Cite the source. Build your family story on documents you can point to, not on a hunch that felt right at 1 a.m.

That applies to the stories, too. When you write that your grandfather “came over in steerage in 1909,” base it on the passenger manifest. The detail lands harder when it’s true.

So here’s what I’m asking

Pick one ancestor. Just one. The one whose face you can’t quite picture.

Go find a record — a real one, a vital record or a census page or a probate file — and write down where you found it. Then write one paragraph about who that person was. Grab a free cheat sheet if you’re stuck. Follow a link if you need a subscription or a book to get there. That last part keeps Genealogy Bargains running, and I’m grateful for it.

But the research is yours. The story is yours. I’m just here to hand you the map and point at the trailhead.

Your great-grandmother has been waiting a long time for someone to write her name down correctly. Are you going to be the one who finally does it?

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Author’s Note: I want to be transparent that this content – Make a Living, Not a Killing: How I Approach Genealogy at Genealogy Bargains – was created in part with the help of an artificial intelligence (AI) language model – Claude Opus . The AI assisted in generating an early draft of the content, but every paragraph was subsequently reviewed, edited, and refined by me. The final content is the result of extensive human curation and creativity. I am proud to present this work and assure readers that while AI was a tool in the process, the story, style, and substance have been carefully shaped by the author.