A Baker's Dozen: Free Advice to Applicants for Certification

1. Don't be shy; show what you know! 

2. If you read the NGS Quarterly in hopes of finding your own ancestors, don't apply yet. 

3. If you don't read the NGS Quarterly, start. 

4. When in doubt, question every piece of information. When not in doubt, question every piece of information. Then explain. See #1.

5. Breathe deep and savor the difference between a transcription and an original record.

6. Don't sweat the petty things -- follow the GPS. If you think that means Global Positioning System, don't apply yet.

7. If you need to survey the literature, remember that not all of it is in the form of unsourced trees on Ancestry.

8. To analyze is human; to correlate is divine.

9. Get comfortable with the strangeness of the past. It is not the present in funny clothes.

10. Practice. Never, ever submit the first one you did of anything.

11. If your teachers and friends think anything goes, find new ones.

12. Read the directions. 

13. Really. Read the directions. 




Harold Henderson, "A Baker's Dozen: Free Advice to Applicants for Certification," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 November 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]
 

Methodology Monday with three generations in three pages

Not all articles in top genealogy periodicals have to be long or involve a convoluted tangle of indirect evidence. If you're having a short-attention-span day, Arlene V. Jennings's recent inquiry into the mother of Jane (Fife) Smart (b. 1769) is quick and to the point in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.

Sometimes good methodology is just about knowing where to look. In this case two parallel record sets give varying results: no name for Jane's mother in one, and two different surnames for her in the other. Probate files for her father and husbands provide the "glue" to piece together vital records, identifying Jane as a daughter of her mother's middle (second) marriage, and reaching back to Jane's mother's mother's surname in the early 1700s.



Arlene V. Jennings, "Jane Fife's Mother, Elizabeth (Sowersby) Stather Fife Hought," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 102 (June 2014): 93-95.


Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday with three generations in three pages," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 August 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]