What I would have liked to know as a newbie

I did a lot of genealogy before I had any idea that there were such things as standards, national conferences, an Association of Professional Genealogists, or a Board for the Certification of Genealogists. These things all dawned on me once I got more serious -- and as my previous job, career, and occupation started dissolving.

I love being in genealogy as a business and as a profession. But there are still a few things that I would be happy to have learned sooner:

(1) Most professional genealogists do not rely exclusively on genealogy-based income to support themselves and their families.

(2) Aside from Utah, which is a special case, it helps to be farther east. Pennsylvania has more decades of researchable genealogy than Indiana, just as Indiana has more than Wyoming.

(3) Not all specialties are created equal. Some make better business models than others.

(4) A professional -- whether in terms of standards or doing work for money -- needs to be prepared for some bumps. We don't always know what we don't know; I sure didn't. The process is more fun for those who can take some correction, and who can enjoy both learning new things and un-learning some old ones. (And if you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that I think genealogy's problem is that people don't criticize one another enough or in the right ways.)

(5) It helps to have some family background or comfort level with running a business. I did not.



Harold Henderson, "What I would have liked to know as a newbie," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 19 June 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.]

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.]

BCG revises and updates Genealogical Standards

Thirteen years ago, the best minds in genealogy, under the aegis of the Board for the Certification of Genealogists, published a manual of genealogy standards, in which they began to wean the field away from terminology like "preponderance of the evidence" borrowed from law and not specific enough for our needs.

Now some of the same best minds have revised, reorganized, updated, and published it as Genealogy Standards. The basics -- the five-part Genealogical Proof Standard -- remain the same. And the need for standards remains the same. As editor Thomas W. Jones writes, they provide "a guide to sound genealogical research and a way to assess the research outcomes that genealogists produce. They are standards for anyone who seeks to research and portray accurately people’s lives, relationships, and histories." (More from him on the changes over at Angela McGhie's blog Adventures in Genealogy Education.)

One of my favorites is Standard 39, "Information Preference":

Whenever possible, genealogists prefer to reason from information provided by consistently reliable participants, eyewitnesses, and reporters with no bias, potential for gain, or other motivation to distort, invent, omit, or otherwise report incorrect information. At the same time, genealogists understand that some preferred information items could be proved inaccurate, less desirable items might be proved accurate, or they may be the only extant relevant information items.

This is why those who seek numerically precise degrees of certainty in genealogy will always be frustrated. That kind of certainty is not available. While some sources are on average more reliable than others, there is never a guarantee. And in genealogy it's the veracity of the particular source that we're concerned about, and the best way to determine that is not to compute averages but to compare its information with that from other, independent sources. (Think of it as an elimination tournament in sports. What matters is not your or your team's past record, what matters is its performance on that occasion.)

One other important change is that we now refer to three kinds of sources (original records, derivative records, and authored works), three kinds of information (primary, secondary, and undeterminable), and three kinds of evidence (direct, indirect, and negative). These are not academic distinctions -- they make a difference in how we evaluate and use materials. But that's a story for another day.



Harold Henderson, "BCG revises and updates Genealogical Standards," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Happy new month for genealogists

October is Family History Month. Let me count the ways:

* The Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center is having a program every single day, including an introduction to the new PERSI Thursday morning. (This image is theirs from 2011.)

* Heritage Books is having a 20% off sale through the 5th.

* The Board for the Certification of Genealogists has added three documents to their web site on which to practice transcribing and abstracting (which make up part of one of the seven portfolio requirements for certification). They have also added audio files of two guys who had to go through the certification process twice in order to succeed. BCG is celebrating the 50th year of its age this month as well.

* In case you doubted it, FamilySearch has plans for 2014 and beyond.

* An economist takes the long view of his genealogy and how related we all are. No, it's not footnoted.



Harold Henderson, "Happy new month for genealogists," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 October 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Speaking at NGS in Las Vegas

After a hectic but very enjoyable time at both the Ohio and Indiana genealogical societies' conferences this past weekend, I will be speaking twice at the National Genealogical Society gathering in Las Vegas, "Building New Bridges," next week:

Wednesday, 8 May -- APG luncheon talk on some ways to be advocates and still be genealogists.

Friday,10 May, 4 pm -- A case study, " 'Are We There Yet?' Proof and the Genealogy Police," in the Board for the Certification of Genealogists' BCG Skillbuilding track (go here and then do a search) on a not-too-difficult name-changing ancestor and the lessons we can learn from it for our own research. Is there a place in genealogical methods for the term "flying leap"?

Hope to see y'all there!



Harold Henderson, "Speaking at NGS in Las Vegas," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 April 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.]

Marriage Records and Indexes: Choose the Original

The other day I was asked, "Is it worth getting the marriage license? They say so little, doesn't the index capture all the information?"

Short answers: Yes, and Not usually.

Longer answer: BCG Standard No. 21 reminds us that "the original is the most authoritative source." Are these sketchy old-school records an exception? No. Six reasons from a mainly  Midwestern viewpoint:

(1) Indexers are human. They can leave something out or transcribe something wrong. This is not a rare occurrence. In this 2008 article I compared marriage indexes to each other and the original records they referred to.

(2) The licenses and returns that I've dealt with name the person who married the couple; many indexes do not. That person's identity, denomination (if any), and location may provide clues as to where the couple lived or where they created other records.

(3) They also give the dates of both events if different.

(4) Some licenses and returns give the bride's or groom's ages, or their places of residence, or both. Some also name witnesses.

(5) Sometimes the bride's or groom's ages are implied by a parent or guardian's note giving consent to the marriage. My all-time favorite in this category comes from La Salle County, Illinois (see illustration). Elizabeth Shown Mills has called such records "land mines." This one sure was.

(6) Sometimes auxiliary records such as marriage applications appear in the guise of regular marriage records; if you don't ask, you  may not receive. In Indiana, many researchers know to look for marriage applications beginning in 1905, and better ones 1940-1977. Not so many know that there are two earlier forms with extensive additional information available for some counties as early as 1882.

Choose the original. You won't regret it.

La Salle County, Illinois, marriage record no. 2093, Dickinson-Berry, 1873; microfilm, La Salle County (Illinois) Genealogy Guild, Ottawa.

Board for the Certification of Genealogists, The BCG Genealogical Standards Manual (Washington DC: BCG, 2000), 8-9.

Harold Henderson, "An Index Is a Treasure Map -- Do You Dig?," Indiana Genealogist, vol.19, no. 3 (September 2008):147-150.

Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence Explained (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2007), 16.


Harold Henderson, "Marriage Records and Indexes: Choose the Original," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 16 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.


 

How Can I Prove My Mom?

Does genealogy enable you to prove who your parents were (let alone anyone else's)? Well, to coin a phrase, it depends.

(1) "Proof" in genealogy is not like "proof" in mathematics. If I had the power to re-boot genealogy from the beginning, I would abolish the word altogether and use something else, but we are stuck with it and its misleading connotations. In math, you can prove that in a right triangle the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the two other sides, and it will stay proved. In genealogy proof means, roughly, that you've looked at the relevant evidence, it all agrees (and what doesn't agree can be cogently explained away), and you've written a well-cited well-reasoned argument for your conclusion. (The more precise and thorough official version is here.) But even when you've done all that, there is no way to "prove" that some new piece of evidence will never come along and change your conclusion; that possibility always exists. (And, yes, this applies to DNA evidence too. DNA is a new and valuable tool, but it does not change genealogy into mathematics.)

(2) In real life there is biological parentage and there is social parentage. DNA speaks directly to the issue of biological parentage; other genealogical records document social parentage and usually presume (for instance) that the social children of a married couple are their biological children as well. The most marvelous manifestations of this assumption are Civil War widow's pension records, which routinely include affidavits from midwives attesting that they were present for the birth of little Johnny, and that the claiming widow was indeed his mother. (As if the midwife watched little Johnny from that day to this to see he wasn't switched!) This was an extreme attempt to get biological and social parentage to match up. They don't always, and we have to be alert to obvious and less-than-obvious clues when they don't.

Genealogy has roots in the efforts of royalty to make sure the biologically correct heir took over the crown, and later in the efforts of economic royalty to make sure the biologically correct heir took over the property or the company. This can place today's adoptees, foster children, and others in an anomalous position -- often causing them to dismiss genealogy and lineage societies altogether, or to stay in the fold and become vigorous dissenters from the "tradition" by which biological children take precedence. I can't settle this argument, but a little modesty about how well we can prove biological connectedness is surely in order.

If it's all about who we are, then nature and nurture both play a part. If the same people provided both, OK. If one set of people provided the nature and another set provided the nurture, then from a historical and personal point of view they are both important and both should be traced. (In my opinion those lineage societies who disallow adoptees have some 'splainin' to do.) We can't change the past, but we can deal with it.



Harold Henderson, "How Can I Prove My Mom?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Two roads to CG

For those who choose to submit a portfolio to the Board for the Certification of Genealogists, there has always been the question of when to do the work.

At one extreme (Option #1), the applicant can choose to have all or almost all seven portfolio requirements ready, and then submit a preliminary application, putting the applicant "on the clock" with a deadline of one year to finish. (That deadline can be extended, for a fee, if needed.)

At the other extreme (Option #2), the applicant can go on the clock and then start working on the portfolio. Obviously these two polar options can be compromised.

I chose Option #1 both times, and it has advantages if you can keep the work going and resist daily distractions without an external deadline. One advantage is that if a chosen case study or kinship determination project doesn't work out, you can just pick another one and keep going without worrying about any particular deadline.

But judging from the advice given at the BCG certification seminar at IGHR (Samford) last week, something closer to Option #2 seems to be growing in favor.

For one thing, Option #2 does provide an external deadline, which can be extended (for a fee) if necessary.

Secondly, it provides greater access to the BCG ACTION list, which is open only to those on the clock and a group of BCG advisors. The list is a place to ask questions and get reliable answers -- as long as the questions do not pertain to the particulars of anybody's portfolio!

But either way, sooner or later, procedural niceties don't matter. You just have to finish those seven portfolio components. They're the interesting part. And if you're wondering whether you're ready to take the plunge at all, check out the BCG site's quiz and Michael Hait's post on the subject at Planting the Seeds last year.



Harold Henderson, "Two roads to CG," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 21 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Are you On Board?

Arguably the thrice-yearly newsletter of the Board for the Certification of Genealogists, OnBoard, has the highest information per ounce of any genealogy publication. In the current (May) issue it's Tom Jones 1, "source snobbery" 0; and Stefani Evans shows just how closely we can analyze even a derivative source.

You do not need to be certified in order to subscribe, and a subscription also supports an organization crucial to maintaining and advancing genealogy research standards.

If you don't have $15 to spare, or aren't sure, check out the generous sampling of articles published 1995-2010 under "Skillbuilding" on the BCG web site. Whatever our level of research, reading these short articles will make us better.





Thomas W. Jones, "Perils of Source Snobbery," OnBoard, vol. 18 no. 2 (May 2012):9-10, 15.



Harold Henderson, "Are you On Board?" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Continue Growing

This morning I got the welcome news that my portfolio met the standards of the Board for the Certification of Genealogists and effective today I am Certified Genealogist(SM) no. 1029.

I know a lot of folks find the initials "CG" intimidating, or even feel that they reflect some kind of repellent exclusivity.

I think they mean that we chose to test our work against the standards of genealogy. Nobody has to do that, not everyone needs to or wants to, but choosing not to do so doesn't make you better. One thing I learned by doing so is that I'm not as good as I thought I was -- I have a lot more to learn. Those initials could also stand for "Continue Growing."

And I know I couldn't have done it without my wonderful (and long-suffering) teachers and friends and clients and wife.

FYI for those embarked on or considering the same path:

* This was the second portfolio I submitted; the first one (two years ago) didn't qualify.

* I believe this was the first portfolio submitted electronically (as a PDF file).

* It took less than four months from submission to notification, although I'm told the usual is closer to six.

* Putting together a portfolio does take a lot of time from other pursuits, but in both cases I learned a great deal just from doing it, especially from carrying the case study and kinship determination project to conclusion (not that they are more important than the other five elements!).

* I have not yet seen the judges' comments, and they will undoubtedly give me some things to work on.

* Never submit the first one you do, of anything.



Harold Henderson, "Continue Growing," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodology Monday with reasonably exhaustive search

Good genealogy requires that we do "reasonably exhaustive" or "reasonably extensive" research, which according to Board for the Certification of Genealogists Standard 19 includes "appropriately broadening the search beyond the person, family, event, or record of most-direct impact on the project," and looking for possibly conflicting information.

Naturally newcomers and learners want more specifics, and there are plenty in Laura Murphy DeGrazia's article on the subject in the October-December NGS Magazine. (She is a Certified Genealogist and president of BCG.) She has a very nice paragraph on this exact point, from which I'll quote only the last sentence: "To meet BCG standards, every search must be extensive enough that a highly experienced researcher would consider it reasonably exhaustive, regardless of the level of experience of the person who conducted the research."