Ways to say "No" in professional situations

Literary historian P. Gabrielle Foreman has this list. Wish I knew this many ways ten years ago!

Did you hear the latest genealogist joke?

Philip Freeman's August 26 article in JSTOR Daily, "Did You Hear the Joke about the Lawyer?", made me laugh out loud, and think about genealogy, which is trying to become a profession at a time when the professions we used to look up to are shrinking in power, numbers, and satisfaction.

Ask Not What Your Professional Organization Can Do For You...

Last week Barbara Mathews made a detailed post to the Association of Professional Genealogists' members-only list explaining the many issues with Ancestry's rendition of Massachusetts town records and how to deal with it and get around at least some of the problems.

For me that post alone was almost worth the $65 annual dues. While few posts there are as thorough and authoritative, there's lots of help requested and received on the list.

 (Full disclosure: I'm on the list a lot, and I'm a member of the APG board. Even fuller disclosure: these are my own unofficial opinions and the 2500 or so other APGers may disagree!)

But while we all have to decide what to do with our limited supply of money, APG is not just a consumer product. We decide whether to subscribe to Ancestry.com or Scotland's People based on whether the benefits to us (including intangibles) will exceed the costs. Same as buying a bag of gummi worms. And that's as it should be.

Deciding to join APG involves more than that calculation. It's also a decision to identify with and support a profession. And a profession, if it's worth anything, is not just a group of people who sell a product or service -- it's also a group of people who uphold the profession's standards.

To take an obvious example: A merchant may sell those books with fancy covers and vaporous language inside that purport to be a "history of your surname." No professional genealogist worthy of the name would have anything to do with that. Of course professionals often seek to earn money, but there are also things they won't do for money.

As Michael Hait wisely pointed out in a recent blog post, APG and the profession (as well as other genealogy societies) are in part what we put into them. So I wouldn't want anyone to join simply because of great posts like Barbara's. We need members; we need volunteers; we need folks who take genealogy seriously and will help build up the profession in innovative ways. But if you're all about getting the most for the cheapest, please look elsewhere.




Harold Henderson, "Ask Not What Your Professional Organization Can Do for You...," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 25 January 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Hire an Expert without Buyer's Remorse

My "Expert Series" contribution to Archives.com is up, entitled, "Getting The Most When Hiring a Professional Genealogist." Hint: if you prepare properly, you might discover that you don't even need the help!






Harold Henderson, "Hire an Expert without Buyer's Remorse," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Talking about Professionalism

Genealogists are like journalists: many of us want to think of ourselves as professionals (and many don't), but we are often not thought of that way. The problem is exacerbated by the triple ambiguity of the term, which can mean doing it for money, doing it well, or just doing it in a calm and collected way.

The Transitional Genealogists Forum has just had a non-flaming discussion of the subject. If you're interested but in a hurry, I recommend visiting the archives for September and seeking out the thoughtful posts by Jillaine Smith, John Yates, and Connie Sheets.(Yes, I am outsourcing this post!)

I am well aware that some people want this topic to go away. It never will, as long as we individually and collectively have a reach that sometimes exceeds our grasp.

What can we do to make things better, raise standards in fact, and raise our collective reputation? Surely continuing education is paramount. Whether any group should require it is debatable. What kind of "best practices" any group should put forth is also debatable. But it's sure necessary, because the field is changing constantly, and newbies are coming through all the time.


Harold Henderson, "Talking about Professionalism," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Weekend Wonderings: What Would You Write About?

Suppose, just hypothetically, that you were tapped (or inspired) to write a blog post every few months on "The State of the Profession" of genealogy.

What would you write about? What stories or numbers would you seek out? Who would you interview? Would you focus on scholarship? education? advocacy? money? TV shows?

Or would you firmly turn away and not do it?



Harold Henderson, "Weekend Wonderings: What Would You Write About?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Mything the Point of the Past

Louis Menand of Harvard corrects a bit of TV-journalism mythmaking in the New Yorker and reflects:

People in any profession like to create an imaginary past, populated by the Ones Who Came Before. Sometimes, we figure these people to be narrow-minded fools and feel motivated to demonstrate our own superior tolerance and sophistication. More honorably, if not necessarily more accurately, we imagine our predecessors as nobler and braver than our small and anxious selves -- as men and women who stood up for principle . . . 

I have seen this happen in some literature in the fields of urban planning and education. I reckon this commentary could apply to genealogy as well, and often to our use of history in general, not just the history of a profession.

Was some part of our past a Golden Age? Or an Age of Dunces and Midgets? Any history that fits either plot may make a riveting story, but it has probably (at best) omitted a lot of interesting information. Like our own lives, the real past is usually more mixed and confusing than makes us comfortable.



Louis Menand, "Seeing It Now: Walter Cronkite and the legend of CBS News," The New Yorker, 9 & 16 July 2012, 88-94.


Harold Henderson, "Mything the Point of the Past," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 13 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Professionals and amateurs, together forever

When genealogists get talking about professionalism, we often tend to compare genealogy unfavorably to well-established professions like doctors and lawyers. I think that better comparison groups are drivers, writers, and people involved in child care. (And this applies whether you define "professional" as "doing it for money" or as "doing it to high standards.")

Each of these three fields is divided between:

(1) a small group of experienced and knowledgeable professionals, and

(2) a large and constantly replenished group of amateurs. Some of the amateurs are quite competent. Others may actually be dangerous to themselves, their neighbors, and their respective professionals -- such as the guy who cut me off yesterday, or the amateur writer who omitted the comma from "Let's eat, grandma."

Within each occupational group, amateurs and professionals interact constantly and have an ill-defined and sometimes uncomfortable relationship.

In genealogy and driving, there are some standards-based ways to identify professionals based on performance. You have to have a certain class license to drive a semi, and you have to be OKd by the proper body to use the initials CG or AG. But the tension remains.

Just having standards and being able to enforce them in some ways doesn't erase the need to continuously negotiate the nebulous boundaries between amateur and professional. There will always be more amateurs, and some of them will look askance at those who do genealogy for pay, or who insist on reference notes. I don't see any long-term "solution," just ongoing discussion, education, and maneuvering.

Even the medical profession, which over the last century achieved strong control over who can practice medicine, is frittering away its franchise by what I (as the opinionated child of a physician) see as a combination of expense, inconvenience, arrogance, and industrial-style production-line health care. These days my wife and I  get our flu shots from a pharmacist, who unlike an M.D. is readily accessible at short notice. We also often get our everyday medical advice from family members in auxiliary health professions or from WebMD or the Berkeley Wellness Letter.

For professionals there is no permanent victory, only eternal vigilance -- and eternal flexibility.


Harold Henderson, "Professionals and amateurs, together forever," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Top Five MWM Posts for February-March 2012

The people's choices during February and March on this blog:

1. Another angle on professionalism (March 14)

2. How to prove parents without direct evidence (March 8)

3. Good news for Chicago genealogists (March 20)

4. Resources: Chicago Examiner (February 7)

5. Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy's new milestone (February 1)



Harold Henderson, "Top Five MWM Posts for February-March 2012," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Another angle on professionalism

William Cronon has been one of my favorite historians ever since 1991, when he published the definitive account of 19th-century Chicago and its hinterland, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.

Now he's the president of the American Historical Association with some interesting thoughts on that profession in the March 2012 AHA newsletter Perspectives on History:

. . .professional historians who work in the academy should be immensely grateful when they are joined in an organization like the AHA by professional historians who make documentaries, design web sites, post blogs, curate exhibits, teach school, and publish popular books. Only if we all gather together under the same big tent will we be able to learn from each other the ways good history can be more effective in reaching the many audiences that hunger for its insights. Forty million people watched Ken Burns's documentaries on The Civil War. Barbara Tuchman probably influenced more people's understanding of the First World War than any other historian of her generation. Public school teachers shape the historical consciousness of many millions more students (and citizens) than college teachers ever will. And so on and on.

How do we avoid professional boredom? By making sure we don't define "professional" too narrowly.

Read the whole thing!