The Virtual Institute -- a new and hopefully vigorous hybrid

The excuses for not continuing genealogy education are steadily dwindling.

Another excuse winked out last week, when three friends and colleagues announced the Virtual Institute of Genealogical Research. The Virtual Institute will offer a series of short courses on-line in webinar format: four lectures of 90 minutes each, plus copies of the video and some exercises, all for about $70 per course. The format is two lectures on each of two consecutive Saturdays. Cofounders Michael Hait, Melanie Holtz, and Catherine Desmarais are all board-certified genealogists.

Compared to a standard webinar, a Virtual Institute course takes much longer and can go much deeper, and it will be limited to 100 students each. Compared to a standard institute course of 30 that lasts five days, a Virtual Institute course is much larger and much shorter -- and also much less expensive in money (no travel, no lodging) and in time (no week-long absence).

What The Virtual Institute cannot offer is the camaraderie and personal contact of a regular institute. But it has a corresponding asset the regular institutes can't match: much greater flexibility in offering specialized courses at all levels. (Traditional institutes were notoriously slow in recognizing the need for courses in DNA.) The first five planned courses illustrate the point: proof arguments (Michael Hait, CG), agricultural records (Mark Lowe, CG), family photographs (Maureen Taylor), Irish research strategies (Donna Moughty), and autosomal DNA (Blaine Bettinger).

For those of us who want to learn and can't get out, The Virtual Institute will be the place to "go." It will add significantly to the many ways that genealogists can learn from the best.


*Note 22 September 2014: VIGR has been rechristened "The Virtual Institute" and this post has been revised to reflect that change.*

Harold Henderson, "The Virtual Institute -- a new and hopefully vigorous hybrid," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 September 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]
























Harold Henderson, "VIGR -- a new and hopefully vigorous hybrid," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 September 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Wandering through the wilderness

Item: I am in possession of a new hardbound self-published genealogy book with enough hundreds of pages that it could be dangerous to try to pick it up one-handed. It obviously cost plenty of time and money to create. It contains a fair number of original documents and many photographs; few if any reference notes; a name index but no place index. For relatives who are not close, the organization is hard to follow; for non-relatives looking for possible cousin connections, it's discouraging.

Item: Several recently self-published books persist in using the Henry system of distinguishing relatives. (I did too, back in the day.) By this system I can easily distinguish 1-11-10-12-8-1-1 from his cousin 1-11-10-12-5-1-4. Got it?

Item: The largest US genealogy society surveyed its members last month. Nearly half of those responding plan to attend NO genealogy conferences this year. Bear in mind that these are people who already care enough to (a) send the New England Historic Genealogical Society at least $75 per year, (b) read their weekly on-line newsletter, and (c) respond to their weekly poll. Imagine the percentage for those who lack these characteristics! (Actually I don't have to imagine. In one society I know, the attendance rate at a national conference two hours away last year was 2%.)

Item: And among those who do attend conferences and the like, prolific blogger and instructor James Tanner finds little to cheer about. He taught a class on MyHeritage.com in which "only three or so participants in a class of thirty . . . had even heard of the program." On other occasions he fielded comments from people who weren't interested in the program because it was based in Israel, who weren't interested in FamilySearch because it was "Mormon," and who asked "whether FamilySearch owned Ancestry.com."

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that a lot of people are not learning. I don't think it follows that we should quit. Clearly we need all kinds of genealogy education, more of it, and new ways to spread the word.



Harold Henderson, "Wandering through the wilderness," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 5 June 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

"I Learned So Much"

Thoughts after the SLIG Advanced Evidence Practicum: We tend to think of learning as something that either sticks or doesn't stick. That's not the whole story. A lot of the skills we want to learn have to be called into action at the right time. You can know that X is the right thing to do in Y situation. But actually doing X in the Y situation is something else altogether.

Developing a good habit is not a binary process, where first you haven't learned it and then you have. It's a long-term process of some steps forward and some back, in genealogy or anything else.





Harold Henderson, "I Learned So Much," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 January 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

History for Non-Readers

Colorado State University Pueblo historian Jonathan Rees writes over at The Historical Society:

 . . . humanities professors faced with non-reading students have to teach their recalcitrant readers the kinds of reading skills that they’ve never learned.

. . . In their classic How to Read a Book Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren speak of Elementary Reading, Inspectional Reading, and Analytical Reading.  To get students to that third level, you have to read with them.  Open the book during class.  Make them read aloud to the class.  Discuss the implications of those ideas.

Rees is also the author of the recently published Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life, covering the US 1877-1929 (and available as an e-book). His list of "case studies" makes me suspect that even those of us who think we know some history may benefit from reading it . . . out loud or otherwise. (If it's as good as it could be, I might agitate for a prequel covering 1845-1877.)



Jonathan Rees, "Bend, Don't Break," The Historical Society, posted 26 November 2012 (http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2012/11/bend-dont-break.html : accessed 26 November 2012).


Jonathan Rees, Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life: A Brief Introduction (Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2012).


Harold Henderson, "History for Non-Readers," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Teaching What You Just Learned

James Lang, a professor of English at Assumption College, has an interesting review-and-commentary article dealing in part with Therese Huston's Teaching What You Don't Know.

Having read the article and not the book, I suspect they are mistitled, and that the correct title would be something like "Teaching What You Recently Learned." The core argument seems to be that novices (recent learners) remember better what it's like not to be learning a subject than do long-time experts. Lang quotes Huston: "A content novice is also more likely than a content expert to relate difficult concepts to everyday, common knowledge—to something the student already knows—simply because the instructor doesn't have a vault of specialized knowledge on the topic from which to draw."

There is surely some truth to this, but I can think of plenty of counterexamples in genealogy world. And surely one job of a good teacher is to retain that precious memory of their former ignorance and how they climbed out of it. Your experience?


[P.S. Yes, Huston's book was published almost four years ago. On this post-Thanksgiving week, I also thank the publishers and editors with the good sense to know that books published more than six months ago are still worth writing and talking about.]



James Lang, "Teaching What You Don't Know," Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 October 2012 (http://chronicle.com/article/Teaching-What-You-Dont-Know/135180/ : accessed 22 November 2012).

Therese Huston, Teaching What You Don't Know (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Harold Henderson, "Teaching What You Just Learned," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The state of play in genealogy

"Most genealogical research and compilation is done badly. Objective reviewers regularly criticize the accuracy of genealogical books, and the Internet makes voluminous genealogical errors available to all. Many family historians, including some with professional standing, base their conclusions on inadequate indexes, haphazard and incomplete research, and poorly documented compilations and databases. They do not recognize that their results sometimes are erroneous and often partial or unnecessarily tentative. Many thorough researchers using reliable sources lack the expertise to recognize clues that could reveal generations beyond those that records specify directly. Many have no glimmer of what they do not know."

Ouch! That's Tom Jones, writing in the Jewish genealogy journal Avotaynu 23 (Fall 2007): 17-23. His whole article, titled "Post-secondary Study of Genealogy: Curriculum and Its Contexts," is available on line (PDF with formatting quirks), and proposes what a professional genealogy curriculum could look like, and needs to look like in order to remedy the condition of the field.

For free genealogy education, it's hard to beat the Transitional Genealogists Forum, where I first learned of this article.