Unsolicited advice for national conference and institute recidivists

There is no sixth day of Samford but it's still making me think.

Many sets of advice exist for first-time attendees of national conferences or institutes, regularly and appropriately repeated. In the post-Samford recovery period, it occurs to me that there's not much advice for those who come back for seconds, and thirds, and -- well, you know. My list is short:

(1) Realize that you are likely to accumulate a whole new set of wonderful friends. I'm not sure that that's any serious/transitional/professional genealogist's goal. (We do tend to be less likely than average to be social butterflies, given the solitary nature of much of our work.) But it happens.

(2) Realize that you will become overcommitted.

What follows from these two is that we soon find ourselves in need of establishing our goals, planning accordingly, and keeping track of conversations had and promises made more or less casually in the course of a meal, or a day. (Samford is not heaven -- we still have to work, and besides, there are snakes.) Asking folks to remind us with an email is a good strategy too, but what if they forget?

I don't care if we keep track 20th-century style with notes or some later way. But if we get in the habit before we have to -- like learning to cite sources when we know perfectly well what and where they are -- then we'll have it when we really need it.

Feel free to add less obvious suggestions in the comments!



Harold Henderson, "Unsolicited advice for national conference and institute recidivists," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 16 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

IGHR Samford Day 5: why law?

On Friday, the final morning at Samford, Claire Bettag's whirlwind yet detailed account of civil law (mainly known in Louisiana in the US, but quite prevalent elsewhere) made me wish either that I had French ancestors or that there were more US states that followed civil law -- what a great source of records!

Overall, Course Six (picture of the week's inhabitants in their natural habitat here, thanks to Sandi Hewlett) gave us a good start on a practical working knowledge of the common-law records we more often deal with. But what is the point, when we could just hunker down and eyeball records without knowing anything about law behind them? After this week I think there are two reasons for genealogists to study law, but I may be missing others:

(1) Legal records that appear in law libraries (that is, records of state appellate and supreme court decisions, and of federal trial, appellate, and Supreme Court decisions) can be a source of direct information about ancestors, and in really difficult cases can be used as another nationwide dragnet to locate them in time and place. They do have limitations. Only a fraction of cases filed are tried, only a fraction of those tried are appealed, only a fraction of those appealed actually complete the appeal, and sometimes not even all of those are recorded and published. When they are published the courts' focus will tend to be on legal principles rather than the facts of the case. And the indexes also can be somewhat difficult to use for our purposes. But when we score a hit it can be a uniquely good one.

(2) The law codes themselves (which come in various forms and flavors) provide a framework for reaching conclusions by deduction, i.e., using indirect evidence. If all we know about an ancestor is that she had to have parental consent to get married in Ohio in 1835, and if we know how to find out the age at which women could legally marry only with such consent, then we have good (not irrefutable) evidence as to when she was born. Without knowing the law we have only a vague guess.

So even dry dusty law books can be part of the process that Dr. Larry H. Spruill eloquently and humorously described at Thursday night's banquet: genealogy as resurrection of the forgotten dead.



Harold Henderson, "IGHR Samford Day 5," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 16 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

IGHR Samford Day 4

The penultimate day of Course 6 was a smorgasbord. In the morning, Patricia Walls Stamm served up heaping portions of government documents tied to the settling and mapping of the US as it grew. Did you know that maps are an under-appreciated portion of the U.S. Serial Set? We learned the key to the secret code "ASP035-08 (24-1) Pub.land 1349, map 1."

After lunch, Ruth Ann Hager of the St. Louis County Public Library gave an exquisitely organized and timed presentation on four key resources for research in the Civil War era:
* states' slavery laws,  
* The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1861-65),
* War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, and
* Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion.

All have varying degrees of off-line and on-line availability. Key insight: these last three items have more to say about civilians and fugitive slaves than one might expect.

And after all that we had an hour and a half to do instructive "homework" on both phases. A major point of the whole day, if not the whole course, was to temper our genealogical inclination to search only for names.

With just the banquet and a half-day to go, it's time for class photos, preliminary farewells, and preliminary packing. Even Craig Scott's mobile bookstore is boxed back up.



Harold Henderson, "IGHR Samford Day 4," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 14 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

IGHR Samford Day 3

Today Course 6 jetted from the 19th-20th century in the morning and into the 21st in the afternoon. In the morning, we worked on eight genealogical problems that can be solved through law library books. Most of us were able to solve only one or two in the allotted time. Then after lunch, with the help of a gentleman from WestLaw, we whizzed through all eight in just over an hour. (Of course, WestLaw is far from free, but sometimes available to patrons at university law libraries.) The value of reporters and digests, however accessed, is now clear in our minds as a genealogical research tool in itself, quite aside from and in addition to the importance of knowing "the law" in order to wring more information out of recalcitrant records.

It was a good sequence, first being grounded in the physical world and then seeing it in a different light. (I'm told that's how law schools themselves try to do it.) But lack of sleep is also beginning to take a toll now that the week is more than half over.



Harold Henderson, "IGHR Samford Day 3," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 13 June 2012 (http://michaelhait.wordpress.com/ : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

IGHR Samford Day 2

Today's high points included being (re)introduced to legal research in general and to the law library of the Cumberland Law School here at Samford. It's a beautiful building with a circuitous entrance and generous long hours. It's full of reporters, digests, session laws, statutes at large, legal encyclopedias, legal journals, microtext, and even some regular books -- headed by a kindly reference librarian with degrees in both law and librarianship. We will see more tomorrow, spurred on by several research problems posed by our Course 6 instructors.

In the evening, Tom Jones and Elissa Powell headed up a seminar/discussion on the BCG certification process for those who are interested or who might be. Several of us spoke on why we applied, how we applied, and why some of us didn't succeed on our first try. I think some fun and information were had by all. (Don't submit the first one you do of anything!)

Many of my cohort stayed up too late talking last night and are now just a bit brain-dead, but that's part of the experience too. The weather has been more clement than average, so far. We hear good reports of Thursday night's banquet speaker. If you prefer your news from here in visual form, do check out Maddy McCoy's photo blog at Historic Wanderings.


Harold Henderson, "IGHR Samford Day 2," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 12 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

IGHR Samford Day 1

Co-coordinator Ann Carter Fleming walked our class, Course 6, through the wonderful overlapping world of government documents, and then set us some puzzles to solve with them. Government documents (that is, those authored and published by the government) just don't behave like many other documents of genealogical interest. Only in some new on-line incarnations are they even indexed by name. But even to blunder around creatively you need to understand the landscape, which is complicated. Searches in print indexes by subject and geographic location sometimes work well. I found out personally that searching hopefully in a document that my ancestor or an associate might have been involved in does not work so well, but I am told that it does sometimes. That kind of uncertainty is a familiar quantity in genealogy.

What was most apparent from Fleming's lectures and from our own searching and browsing is that a great many things turn up in government documents that normal people would never expect to see. Would you like a nice list of neighbors in between censuses? Look for the record of a contested election!

Samford's library is a good place to have this class. The library affords quite a bit of choice in searches: at least two physical approaches to the Serial Set, and maybe as many as half a dozen on-line avenues.

Tomorrow we have a phase change, and it's all aboard for the law library . . .  I am reminding myself that "statutes at large" does not refer to a jailbreak by a bunch of Michelangelo sculptures!



Harold Henderson, "IGHR Samford Day 1, " Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

IGHR Samford Day 0, resting briefly in the shade

If you've been to IGHR (the week-long Institute for Genealogical and Historical Research) at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, you don't need my description. And if you haven't been there, you may not understand it when I call it a cross between a conference and a homecoming, in which the party comes the evening before the work begins.

For me, the advent is a two-day car trip, this year solo. Saturday I stopped off at the Indiana State Library and wound up hitting almost every research target I aimed at. (More on that later.) Sunday I drove and listened to recordings of talks given by Tom Jones and Elizabeth Shown Mills at the National Genealogical Society conference last month. Tom managed to condense documentation into five questions and then into two basic principles; Elizabeth laid out a plan for organizing research so that you won't have to go back and do it over. I need to recheck the syllabus material in order to get the most out of them.

And there was no time for that once I arrived on the hillside campus, what with getting registered, getting settled, greeting friends old and new, telling newcomers where to go next (it's my fourth year here so I can pass for an old-timer), checking out the used books for sale in the library, and even selling a few of my wife's heavy-duty coffee mugs emblazoned with trees.

Debra Hoffman filled in ably for the absent ProGen Study Group leader Angela McGhie at the study group reunion and recognition. Afterwards the conversation devolved into small groups. Mine got into stories and advice about writing genealogical articles, and we were far from the last to leave.

Director Lori Northrup borrowed the best line of the evening when she quoted Samford's president: "We rest in the shade of trees we did not plant." At the end of a long day that's a good thought to mull over in the calm before the storm of genealogical activity set to begin at 8 am sharp Monday morning.


Harold Henderson, "IGHR Samford Day 0," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Welcome new bloggers

Blogging -- easy to start, hard to keep going. Here are two new genealogy blogs (from friends) that look like keepers:

(1) Sheri Fenley's The Educated Genealogist (began in August). If you've been on the APG or Transitional Genealogists mailing list and read her thigh-slapping account of her first time at Samford, she needs no introduction. If you haven't, then just close this window right now and go to the archives. She's from California but has Kansas roots, and that's enough of an excuse for me to put her on here. In the department of learning stuff, she recently posted about a contradiction between a cemetery stone and a census -- either a certain ancestor returned from the dead, or one of these records is in error!

(2) Kathy Brady-Blake's Kathy's Genealogy Blog (began in October). Kathy's a Certified Genealogist, and for I don't know how long BCG had her portfolio up for us aspirants to read as an example. Does that take guts or what? She's from Illinois with an interest in Chicago -- as well she should, since one of her ancestors went back into the teeth of the Great Fire to make sure his soon-to-be-incinerated front door was locked!

Both Sheri and Kathy use a lot of photos, tell about their own research, and participate in tagging games and blogging carnivals -- so if you find it boring over here, they may be more your style. I'm adding them both to my Protopage home page so I can keep up. Go and do likewise.