Back to the future in a self-driving car

Nobody knows what genealogy will be like in 2117. But three weeks from today, at the BCG luncheon at FGS Pittsburgh, you can hear some things I think might happen. It's not all good news but some of it could be funny.

Benjamin Franklin supposedly asked to be waked up every 100 years to be told what was going on. Is he just as glad we didn't?

Genealogical summaries and family chronicles

These days I mainly work on putting together 3- and 4-generation "downstream" accounts of my wife's and my less-documented ancestors (what are called "genealogical summaries" in the journals, and often closely resemble the "kinship determination projects" required by BCG). These give me much better family perspectives on the whole family than just researching upstream for direct ancestors does.

They also sometimes produce problem articles too. Just now there was a young woman who married into my father-in-law's father's mother's Mozley family. Nobody has parents for her, and it now appears that she at least has siblings and was not born in North Dakota but likely came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire around 1903.

Article about problems (as in NGSQ) are tough to write -- the writer has to show how logic is applied to bring conclusion out of confusion. But I'm finding these family chronicles are not as simple as they look. They pose their own writing problems.

The good news is that often it's possible to drill right down to day-by-day or month-by-month accounts of fortunes and misfortunes, thanks especially to the increasing numbers of digitized newspapers and land and probate records. The interesting news is that a pile of facts, no matter how high, does not a story make.

Often I will go back to the work-in-progress and find that I never wrote a topic sentence (usually because I was  just listing what happened without trying to pull it together or make sense of it somehow), and the story and maybe even the most fanatical reader gets lost. The paradox here is to find ways to be both thorough and concise.

Don't get me wrong -- a pile of facts is a lot better than nothing. But the more we (or our editors!) can see and communicate the stories in their lives, the more likely they are to be read and remembered.

Tomorrow night's BCG webinar on some genealogy reflexes

I'll be talking about genealogy reflexes and how they relate to doing good genealogy and becoming certified, at the BCG free webinar Tuesday night the 17th at 5 pm PST, 6 MST, 7 CST, and 8 EST. Hope to "see" some of you there. It's open to the public but seating is limited, so register early and sign in early.


https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5631969406323382786

Fall 2015 talks

In between the sloth of summer and the hibernation of winter are the seasons where it's actually fun to get things done. This fall I have five speaking engagements coming up.

Tuesday evening September 8, La Porte County Genealogical Society, La Porte, Indiana:
"Probate Will Not Be the Death of You" (digest version).

Saturday September 19, Willard Library, Evansville, Indiana:
"Why We Don't Write and How We Can"
"Indirect Evidence: When Perry Mason Isn't on Your Side"
"Probate Will Not Be the Death of You"
" 'Are We There Yet?' Proof and the Genealogy Police," a case study

Saturday October 17, Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society, Valparaiso, Indiana:
"Land and Property: The Records No Genealogist Can Do Without"

Tuesday evening October 20, Marshall County Genealogical Society, Plymouth, Indiana:
"Ten Commandments for Being a Good Genealogy Client"

Tuesday evening November 17, Board for Certification of Genealogists public online webinar:
"Do You Have the Reflexes You Need to Become Certified? Fifteen Things Your Grandfather Would Tell You . . . If I Were Your Grandfather"

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Miscellaneous Monday with APG PMC, Jeanne Larzalere Bloom, and technical writing tips

Getting ready to speak in Terre Haute on " 'Are We There Yet?' Proof and the Genealogy Police," so here's what's news in my world:

* This is the last week to get the early-bird price for the Association of Professional Genealogists' Professional Management Conference at the Salt Lake City Hilton January 8-9. It features presentations, workshops, and chances to meet people that you will not normally find at the big conferences -- not to mention the world's greatest genealogy library within walking distance.

Don't let APG's middle name fool you: anyone who's ramping up their genealogy but isn't necessarily interested in the business end will find plenty of value here. Those under the age of 30 will also find a discounted registration fee!

* The increasingly active BCG blog "Springboard" has a quotable visit with newly elected president Jeanne Larzalere Bloom, CG. "My journey with BCG began in the 'dark ages,' in the late 1990s . . . During the process I realized I had overestimated how 'good' I was and there was much that I needed to learn. Assembling the portfolio focused my genealogy education."

* The ever-diligent Scout Report has assembled a bouquet of items on technical writing. They tend to be focused on science, but the one that I did read through ("Sentence Structure of Technical Writing") was almost entirely appropriate for genealogy technical writing, as in the BCG portfolio requirement of a complex-evidence case study, or in the top journals in the field, or any time we're trying just to lay out our own evidence and reasoning clearly enough that we will be able to understand it when we pick up that project a few months from now. "Budget adequate time to write, review, revise and edit."



Harold Henderson, "Miscellaneous Monday with APG PMC, Jeanne Larzalere Bloom, and technical writing tips," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 November 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Time is not on our side

For those planning to submit a portfolio to the Board for the Certification of Genealogists, BCG proposes a 12-month timetable.

Is it a good timetable? That depends on you and your situation. For me, the task was so much bigger than any other genealogy project I'd ever done that it was just hard to wrap my mind around it. But I think we all could use some such timetable . . . and then use it to track our progress so that we can see whether we are likely to get done in time, or whether we will need an extension. I'm a great believer in breaking tasks down into manageable components.

If you're going to seek certification (or undertake any comparably large project), figure out what you're going to give up for the duration. Even if you follow Michael Hait's path of submitting samples of your everyday work on randomly chosen families, it will take longer than you think. 

Seriously. All the genealogists I know are overcommitted. Those I know who are on their second or third extension to complete their portfolios are not there because they don't know how to do the work and write it up. They don't have time.

A former employer evinced little sympathy for people who told him that: "We all have 24 hours a day." He was right in the sense that priorities have to be set. A segmented schedule of the kind BCG proposes will give us a way to measure whether we've got them set right yet, while there is still time to make mid-course corrections.


Harold Henderson, "Time is not on our side," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 12 June 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Is the story everything in genealogy?

Is it true that in genealogy the story is everything?

Yes -- in a way, up to a point.

I totally believe in stories, especially since they were at the core of my previous (journalistic) life. But loving and seeking family stories is not a good excuse to evade research and proof, or to disregard standards. Two thoughts:

(1) The story is not much good if it's attached to the wrong person or the wrong family. My grandfather thought that his maternal grandfather had watched and waited for a tax sale and bought a nice farm at a good price that way. I've never found any evidence that this happened (although I'm not done looking), but I have found evidence that his paternal great-grandfather did just that, probably more than once.

(2) Often hard-core research in property and probate and more obscure records can reveal stories no one remembers today. I found one while working on a case study for my BCG certification portfolio. I was struggling to trace a family headed by an agricultural laborer who owned no land. I thought they were in Marshall County, Indiana, and I worked all the records I could find and found only three traces there: a census entry, an entry in a book of chattel mortgages, and a brief court record. He had to borrow $90, and to secure the loan he put up "one dark brown medium sized horse, having small head and small ears, and supposed to be eight years old in the spring of 1881. Name of said horse is Frank." The court record came when he couldn't repay the loan and had to forfeit Frank, as well as a set of work harnesses and a wagon. (The story didn't contribute to the solving of that case, but it's burned into my memory even though I'm no relation to that family.)

Standards don't require anyone to suppress stories that are dubious or even proven false. Just be clear about what they are and are not. In fact it may be useful to preserve them. Sometimes a false story or a false piece of information conveys a nugget of truth either in the way it is told, or the kind of mistake it makes, or when it is correlated with documentary evidence. But that's a story for another day . . .


Harold Henderson, "Is the story everything in genealogy? ," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 January 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Have you climbed on board?

If your New Year's resolutions include getting more serious about genealogy, consider subscribing to the Board for the Certification of Genealogists' three-times-a-year publication On Board. At the link you can also view the table of contents for all back issues up to and including the January 2014 issue in which Judy G. Russell, AKA The Legal Genealogist, discusses where DNA fits into genealogical proof these days. (OK, just one quote that needs to be repeated on all social media at every opportunity: "DNA by itself cannot answer even the simplest genealogical question.") Arguably one of the best things about On Board is its brevity. Each article is concise and readable.

You don't have to be board-certified, you don't even have to want to be board-certified, in order to subscribe and benefit from this succinct publication. And if you aren't sure, flip over to the skillbuilding part of the website where you can read more than two dozen article from back issues, dating back to 1995, by highly qualified authors including Elizabeth Shown Mills, Kathleen W. Hinckley, Amy Johnson Crow, Thomas W. Jones, Helen F. M. Leary, and many more. My favorite, however, is by Anonymous, entitled "A Judge's Notes from an Application for Certified Genealogist," and it's a good antidote to the strange but widespread misconception that certification portfolios are evaluated on minute nitpicking details.




Judy G. Russell, "DNA and the Reasonably Exhaustive Search," On Board 20(1):1, January 2014.


Harold Henderson, "Have you climbed on board?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 January 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Is there a finite amount of genealogical evidence?

Tony Proctor has a thoughtful post over at Parallax View, discussing the concept of "proof" and how it differs in science and in genealogy. I encourage you to read the whole thing as he has a lot to say. Since thoughtful theoretical discussions are scarce in genealogy, I thought I'd add three thoughts.

(1) I'm surprised that neither the post nor the comments allude to the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS) or the recent book that explains it most thoroughly, Thomas W. Jones's Mastering Genealogical Proof.

FYI if you're new: the GPS is the only widely accepted standard of proof in genealogy, and it states that no conclusion is proved without five things: thorough research, good citations, analysis and correlation of evidence, resolving any contradictions, and a written account. The best genealogists then working put this GPS together at the end of the 20th century under the auspices of the Board for the Certification of Genealogists (BCG_, as an improvement for our purposes on the "preponderance of the evidence" standard borrowed from the law.

(2) Tony writes,

"Science is about the here-and-now whereas genealogy is about the been-and-gone. What this means is that genealogy only has a finite set of evidence available, and although more of that set may be discovered over time, no evidence outside of that set will ever be found. It also means that evidence cannot be created on demand in order to solve a particular problem, or to support/refute a given proposition. On the other hand, in science — technology permitting — an experiment can be conceived purposely to test a given theory, or to separate two competing theories. . . . Whereas science can usually conduct a specific experiment to disprove some of the candidate theories, and so support the remainder, genealogy can only search for more items of evidence that already exist. If they don’t exist somewhere now then they never will in the future either."

Some sciences, such as paleontology, are about the been-and-gone. I suppose that in the abstract both genealogy and paleontology only have "a finite set of evidence available," but in practice nobody knows all of it or even where it is. Both paleontologists and genealogists find new evidence all the time.

It's true that paleontologists and genealogists cannot conduct laboratory experiments on the past. But they do have the ability to make predictions based on what they know, and then see whether further research supports those predictions. These predictions and tests are quite similar to an experiment. If I find that a man's wife is named in a deed where he sells property, I can predict that there is likely to be some additional evidence of the marriage that I have not yet seen (whether a formal record of the event or an appearance in an obituary), and go look for it.

But I have a quarrel with the whole idea of a "finite" amount of evidence anyway. Evidence is information that can be used to answer a specific question. (That is the agreed genealogical definition.) Sometimes ingenious genealogists find evidence where others might not have perceived any at all.

In a recent NGSQ article by Judy G. Russell, she used records of people working on roads to ascertain when someone died (who had never worked on the roads). Many genealogists would not have thought of using that information as evidence to answer the question "When did Mrs. X die?"

I'm inclined to think that even if the amount of genealogical information is finite, the amount of evidence is not, because it depends on human ingenuity in the use of the information -- much as scientists use ingenuity to design experiments. (Improved indexes can also make information much more available to be used as evidence, as in this example from a few days ago.)

(3) IMO, it's useful to figure out just what constitutes "proof" or "evidence" in different disciplines. I don't think it's useful to fuss about whether one discipline can use the word in a different sense than another discipline, because that's just not going to change. It's not that hard to understand that new evidence can supersede a past proof in genealogy as in science, and that that kind of thing does not happen in mathematics.


(Happy New Year! By Blogger's count, this is MWM blog post #1300.)



Judy G. Russell, “'Don't Stop There!,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 99(1):37, March 2011.

Harold Henderson, "Is there a finite amount of genealogical evidence?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 January 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Are you ready to go for a credential?

The hardest question about seeking certification (through BCG) or accreditation (through ICAPGen) is the very first one: Am I ready?

Self-evaluation is tough at the best of times, and no measure of readiness is foolproof. So I will suggest several independent measures, from various sources. Each of them has pitfalls, but if they all point the same way, then it's probably time to postpone your procrastination and get into the process. (My examples are BCG-based because that's my experience.)

Measure #1 (from Elissa Scalise Powell): If you've done serious genealogy two or three times a week for seven to ten years, you may be ready. This turns out to be close to the idea of 10,000 hours of practice needed to gain mastery in cognitively demanding fields, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers.

Pitfall of this measure: have you really had ten years of experience or only one year's experience ten times over? One way to overcome the pitfall: if you spent your ten years of experience without dealing with any land or probate records, subtract at least five years.

Measure #2: If you can pass the weighted quiz questions on the BCG web site, you may be ready.  

Pitfall: Sometimes we kid ourselves when taking quizzes of this sort.

Measure #3: The easier you find it to read and understand NGSQ articles, the more likely you are to be ready -- especially if you started out not understanding them at all.  

Pitfall: Reading is not always the same as doing.

Measure #4: If you have published in a peer-reviewed journal, you may well be ready.

Pitfall: Sometimes you're not -- especially if you make the plausible but false assumption that an article is the same exact kind of job as the required portfolio materials.

Measure #5: If you cannot stay awake during a lecture by Elizabeth Shown Mills or Thomas W. Jones, then you're definitely not ready. [No pitfall here.]

Measure #6: If everybody you know says you're really good at genealogy, then you might be ready.

Pitfall: The people you know may be extremely polite. Or they may be telling the truth, but have no idea what serious genealogy involves. As in chess, there are more levels of expertise than we can easily imagine.

If you find most of these measures are favorable, then I say go ahead. There is additional generic help available once you are "on the clock."

Don't forget -- some of us learn by doing (which is a polite way of saying that we learned to swim by jumping into the deep end of the pool). As a result, some of us had to go through the process twice in order to succeed. There are worse fates, such as never trying . . . and hence never knowing whether you really had what it takes.



Harold Henderson, "Are you ready to go for a credential?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Getting serious about genealogy

Where to go when you need to find people who take genealogy as seriously as you do?

As befits a volunteer-driven community with little formal, economic, or academic infrastructure, genealogy offers a variety of places, but they are not obvious to the newcomer -- nor to the long-time hobbyist becoming aware of additional dimensions and higher standards in this fascinating pursuit.

I've been involved in many of these, and I list them in a rough order beginning with the least demanding, costly, and formal. It's quite possible that I've omitted some. (Obviously it helps to be exposed to books, blogs, lectures, and webinars by the best genealogists, but I'm focusing on real and virtual places to meet others with the same interest.)

* Transitional Genealogists Forum, lurking or participating.

* Evidence Explained: Historical Analysis, Citation and Source Usage, the web site or ongoing symposium conducted by Elizabeth Shown Mills.

* volunteers in your area who are directly involved in transcribing, indexing, abstracting, or digitizing original records.

* the ProGen Study Group -- and its offspring, the Gen Proof Groups studying Tom Jones's new book Mastering Genealogical Proof. In general, any group(s) devoted to studying good genealogy texts, including NGSQ Articles Online Study Groups. and Dear Myrtle's MGP Study Groups.

* the Association of Professional Genealogists -- benefits of membership include local and virtual chapters, the members-only list, continuing education opportunities in business and genealogy, quarterly journal, monthly newsletter, webinars, and regular gatherings at national conferences.

* intensive institutes (usually lasting about a week, but not to be confused with genealogy conferences), notably the Institute of Genealogy & Historical Research (Samford University Library, Birmingham, June), Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (Utah Genealogical Association, January); Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh (July); National Institute on Genealogical Research (National Archives, Washington DC, July); and the Forensic Genealogy Institute (Council for the Advancement of Forensic Genealogy, Dallas, April?).

* the Genealogical Research Program through Boston University's Center for Professional Education.

* the two genealogy credentialing bodies, BCG and ICAPGen. Unlike all of the above, these are not membership bodies open to all comers, but even those who don't choose to seek credentials can learn from their web sites and occasional public events.

Nobody designed this network of opportunities, and some will suit you better than others. Enjoy what you can!



Harold Henderson, "Getting serious about genealogy," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 June 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Top Five MWM Posts for September 2012

Once again it's time for the monthly popularity contest, listing the most-viewed blog posts made during September. Time permitting, I'll report on October in early December when the dust of that month will have settled.

September was unusual in one way, and typical in another. Usually the most-read posts have to do with genealogy standards and related questions. In September my five-part non-authoritative and non-official series on how to choose which projects to submit in a BCG portfolio swept the top five spots: part 1 introducing the discussion, part 2 on the document work, part 3 on the client report, part 4 on the complex-evidence case study, and part 5 on the kinship determination project (complete with a correction).  The next-ranking posts were not close.



Harold Henderson, "Top Five MWM Posts for September 2012," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]