Are you ready to go for a credential?

The hardest question about seeking certification (through BCG) or accreditation (through ICAPGen) is the very first one: Am I ready?

Self-evaluation is tough at the best of times, and no measure of readiness is foolproof. So I will suggest several independent measures, from various sources. Each of them has pitfalls, but if they all point the same way, then it's probably time to postpone your procrastination and get into the process. (My examples are BCG-based because that's my experience.)

Measure #1 (from Elissa Scalise Powell): If you've done serious genealogy two or three times a week for seven to ten years, you may be ready. This turns out to be close to the idea of 10,000 hours of practice needed to gain mastery in cognitively demanding fields, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers.

Pitfall of this measure: have you really had ten years of experience or only one year's experience ten times over? One way to overcome the pitfall: if you spent your ten years of experience without dealing with any land or probate records, subtract at least five years.

Measure #2: If you can pass the weighted quiz questions on the BCG web site, you may be ready.  

Pitfall: Sometimes we kid ourselves when taking quizzes of this sort.

Measure #3: The easier you find it to read and understand NGSQ articles, the more likely you are to be ready -- especially if you started out not understanding them at all.  

Pitfall: Reading is not always the same as doing.

Measure #4: If you have published in a peer-reviewed journal, you may well be ready.

Pitfall: Sometimes you're not -- especially if you make the plausible but false assumption that an article is the same exact kind of job as the required portfolio materials.

Measure #5: If you cannot stay awake during a lecture by Elizabeth Shown Mills or Thomas W. Jones, then you're definitely not ready. [No pitfall here.]

Measure #6: If everybody you know says you're really good at genealogy, then you might be ready.

Pitfall: The people you know may be extremely polite. Or they may be telling the truth, but have no idea what serious genealogy involves. As in chess, there are more levels of expertise than we can easily imagine.

If you find most of these measures are favorable, then I say go ahead. There is additional generic help available once you are "on the clock."

Don't forget -- some of us learn by doing (which is a polite way of saying that we learned to swim by jumping into the deep end of the pool). As a result, some of us had to go through the process twice in order to succeed. There are worse fates, such as never trying . . . and hence never knowing whether you really had what it takes.



Harold Henderson, "Are you ready to go for a credential?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Know when you're shelving that project

Ideally of course we would all have each of our many projects and potential projects fully annotated and up to date before we turned to another. But often I find that I start on something but have to drop it for various reasons, usually because there's something more urgent on my agenda. More than a decade ago, my brother and I were researching one of our Swedish great-great-great grandfathers, interestingly named Nils Gall. News of an impending grandchild caused us to drop the investigation in haste, and only a year or so later did we realize that certain researches seemed familiar, and we rediscovered where we had left off.

Sometimes I put a project away with a lick and a promise, and the promise is greatly deferred. The trick is to have a good sense of limits, and of priorities, so that we can realize

(a) that we are in fact about to put off an interesting rabbit hole in favor of already promised work or play, and

(b) that before we do so we need to sketch out where we were when we had to set it aside.

This applies whether we've just poked into a couple of manuscript collections and realized that this investigation has to be for another day, or whether we have a half-finished manuscript of our own full of incomplete citations and rows of question marks at certain key junctures. Know Thyself.



Harold Henderson, "Know when you're shelving that project," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9 December  2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Good news for Chicago-area manuscript researchers

The Chicago Collections Consortium is not news and I'm not up to date on its current status, but its every-word-searchable listing of 4660 brief descriptions of publicly available archival collections held by eleven Chicago institutions may be just what your research project needs. The other day I delved into one collection at the Newberry Library, and when I later happened onto the CCC web site I discovered a related collection at the Chicago History Museum. The CCC aspires to a full-fledged portal but this interface is simple, straightforward, and not duplicated elsewhere.

It's not clear exactly what portion of the members' collections are listed on this site, and the listings are less detailed than the institution's own finding aids. But sites like this make reasonably exhaustive searches less exhausting. Besides TNL and CHM, the web site lists current members Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Public Library, and seven schools: Columbia College Chicago, DePaul University, Illinois Institute of Technology, Loyola University Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Chicago. (A 2011 Sun-Times article included the Chicago Park District, Northeastern Illinois University, and Roosevelt University as members, but they are not present on the web site roster.)

And this is all about Chicago. The collection's scope is "Chicago-related collections held by CCC member institutions containing subject matter related to the Chicago metropolitan area. This area includes Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry, and Will counties in Illinois and Lake and Porter counties in Indiana." If you're curious about what these institutions might have on Alaska or Greenwich Village -- or even La Porte County, Indiana; Kenosha County, Wisconsin; or Berrien County, Michigan -- you're on your own.


Map credit: Adapted from United States Census Bureau, "Counties and Statistically Equivalent Areas of the United States, Puerto Rico and the Island Areas," 2003 PDF download (https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/maps/county_wall.html : viewed 29 November 2013).

Harold Henderson, "Good news for Chicago-area manuscript researchers," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Questions to ask land records

If you just don't know what to say or do when confronted with a land record, my friend and colleague Kimberly Powell has ten sure-fire research-conversation starters over at About.com.

Curb Your Enthusiasm!

Genealogy is bigger than we think. Over at Archives.com's "Expert Series," some thoughts on when to enthuse and when to calm down. After enthusiasm, it's all about focus, persistence, and analysis.

Jill Morelli analyzes ten NGSQ articles

I'm delighted to see another blogger, Jill Morelli over at Genealogy Certification: My Personal Journal, publicly reading and analyzing the best work in the field, here and here, under the heading of "Analyzing Ten NGSQ Articles."

She has a different approach to them than I had thought of. Any time the National Genealogical Society Quarterly and other top journals can get a fraction of the social-media exposure that software updates and misleading television shows routinely receive, I'm all for it. Additional publicity here.

Now that I think of it, this blog has gotten away from posting about these journals in recent weeks...


Harold Henderson, "Jill Morelli analyzes ten NGSQ articles," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Genealogy problems can grow, shrink, or metastasize

Often genealogy problems grow. What I once described as a "small genealogy article" has now metamorphosed into a draft in three parts, each of which is (at the moment) well above the normal size.

Sometimes genealogy problems shrink. At one point I was trying to answer an identity question: whether same-name men in eastern New York, western New York, and central Illinois were the same or different. The problem seemed fiendishly difficult, but it turned out to be quite simple to solve (land and probate records were the keys, of course). "Problem shrinkage" can be a real problem for someone trying to locate suitable cases for a BCG portfolio: what looks difficult going in may turn out to be easy after all.

To some extent, problem-spotting is a skill in itself that develops over time, as we read more advanced articles, encounter more situations, and get to know the relevant record sets and ways to use them. But sometimes it's just a matter of luck.

There are also problems that grow laterally, also known as "rabbit holes." Usually they involve collaterals rather than ancestors. An upstate New York cousin of my wife's great-grandfather married into a wealthy Chicago clan (wealthy in the sense of paying lawyers tens of thousands of dollars in order to avoid spending too much money on lawsuits, a full century ago). Some of the ensuing probates and lawsuits name and locate many relatives and associates -- much as the will of a bachelor uncle or spinster aunt can do. So much data -- now I need to identify a question that it answers!



Harold Henderson, "Genealogy problems can grow, shrink, or metastasize," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 2 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]