Pay to Play

Spurgeon Aline Fulford Lumpkin was my mother's 2nd cousin. I never met her but her daughter Rebecca sent me some of her genealogy material. Aline was a lawyer in Alabama and she was very thorough in her family history research. She had small notebooks that she kept notes in and it covered various subjects and leads she had found.

One part of the material that was interesting is her correspondence with a firm in Canterbury England, Achievements, Ltd. who she hired to locate the family of John Fulford who settled in North Carolina in the early 1600s.

Ailne and another cousin, Carolyn Fulford had contacted the company who claimed they could locate the family. Over a period of several years the two of them paid the London company a lot of money to do research. Each letter with a report on their findings implied they were close to success and just needed some more research time and money to find John Fulford's family.

Looking at it now I am probably too cynical about a UK researcher getting Americans to pay to track down their English forbears. I can't find anything in their reports that would have told Aline anything new. I know there are genealogy researchers on both sides of the pond who are less than scrupulous and I've run across a couple close to home.