Genohistory on Purpose will be brief and to the point this issue. After an intensively valuable week at the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research, I am exhausted in the best sort of way. This was my fourth course at IGHR and, like everyone else, my first time to attend from the comfort of my own home. This year, like every other year, I am reminded of the importance of committing to and investing in formal education.
Genohistorians are committed self-educators, without question. It is in our DNA. We are questioners and researchers. We will never stop dosing our minds with new information. But formal coursework, with an established curriculum, a schedule, and the best instructors available brings layers of value that can be acquired in no more efficient way.
My first IGHR experience was in the summer of 2016, when the institute still met at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama—an easy hour drive from my home. I was pretty arrogant back then about what I knew regarding genealogy. I had never been formally trained, but I had a PhD in history and had been doing genealogy on and off since the mid-1980s. I was resisting taking Course 1, the one for beginners. But I feared going into the intermediate class and becoming embarrassed by what I didn’t know.
I took Course 1 and never regretted it. In fact, I never got bored in it. That’s when I realized how much I’d missed in my self-training. I had missed things that had caused me to make serious errors in my family tree. The ignorant assumption that Jr. and Sr. mean son and father, and that alone, had taken me up several wrong trees. And the week was packed with such insights.
I have since taken Courses 2 (learn more here) and 3, again finding myself in awe of what can be learned when you are in a dedicated space with a worthy teacher. Those are the foundational courses of IGHR, with many other courses you can take in any order you please. I love that this education can get advanced and complex, for those who are ready for it, while most education available to us locally has to serve beginners and can never venture too deeply into tough subjects.
This week, I took Course 10: Advanced Library Research: Law Libraries & Gov’t Docs, administered by National Genealogical Society President and Birmingham attorney Ben Spratling and long-time expert genealogy educator Pat Stamm. Coronavirus prohibited the usual practice of touring and using government and law library resources, but our instructors (Spratling, Stamm, and others, including such greats as “The Legal Genealogist” Judy Russell) did a stellar job of taking the fearful mystique out of government documents and law research, despite our remote limitations.
Remember my post about the Alabama Supreme Court case involving my ancestor’s heirs and their outrageous shopping spree? Glad as I was to have found that case and two others before it, needles in a vast haystack, my instructors gave me clues that revealed at least two more Supreme Court cases in that same group of Mayberry ancestors. Even better, they helped me to understand what to do with what I was finding—how to make better sense of it, how to go deeper, and how to know if I am overlooking something of value.
The education itself is worth the money, the time, and the exhaustion, but there’s something more you get from a formal education setting like IGHR. You get to meet people who will be a valuable network and wonderful friends. By a great stroke of serendipity, my Course 10 colleagues were disproportionately military people. They had military careers and/or were military historians. It just so happened I needed these new networks for new projects looming ahead for me. The wisdom I got from them during class discussions and the help I can now call on in the future was worth the price of admission all by itself.
IGHR never disappoints. I even loved the remote classroom this year, where my classmates and I got to see each other’s faces (rather than the backs of heads) as we absorbed valuable information.
Call to Action
Many of you are way ahead of me on this. You’ve already done IGHR, and SLIG and GRIP and many other educational wonders I will seek in the years ahead. Please comment on your experiences and give your advice about the best courses you have had.
For those who have not yet taken the plunge to IGHR or its equivalents elsewhere, I encourage you to commit to giving it a try. If you need to, set up a savings account that is committed to your advanced training. Every month, when your income or retirement check rolls in, have an automatic transfer into that savings account of $50 or $100 or whatever you can afford monthly, in order to pay your tuition and travel. If you can only afford to go once every three or four years—at least you can go then. But make that account sacred to your education.
Get the IGHR Discount
Rather than give out Zotero instruction this week, I will give you what I gave my fellow students at IGHR: a discount on either of my Zotero books. Use the code IGHR2020 on either book, whether in PDF or paperback, in my GCP online store for a 30% discount through August 31, 2020.
Hey Donna, I completely agree with you on the importance of formal education. I have taken a course from the NGS and a couple from local libraries and a community college. I always picked up some bits of knowledge that proved beneficial later. Having said all that, I am reluctant to invest the $$$$$ and time to attend out-of-town seminars/courses etc at my advanced age (late 70’s). I do continue to read national, state, and local journals and quarterlies which keep me pretty much up to date. I enjoy your newsletter very much also. Keep up the excellent work.
Henry Land
Thank you, Henry! I also dislike the expense and hassle of travel. And I suffer migraines when under florescent lights, as most classrooms have. In this one thing, perhaps coronavirus has helped us. Our education venues are learning to send the classroom to us. I hope they continue to do that, even after it is safe to gather.
Bravo. Your insight into the power of learning provided in a structured course via IGHR vs a self guided approach is significant. And understanding that “they helped me to understand what to do with what I was finding—how to make better sense of it …” would be helpful to all of us.
Thank you, Fred, and my apologies that it took me a week to see that there were comments pending. I know your academic background has trained you well on the power of structured learning. I appreciate your insights!
I am thrilled that there are more opportunities for virtual institutes now! It is definitely an unexpected bonus from the pandemic.
Thanks so much, Nicole–and with Fred (above) I also apologize to you for my failure to see that comments were pending. Like you, I think the pandemic, for all its horrors, is taking genealogy and history into new frontiers–technologies we have needed to embrace for some time. And in a way, the world has grown smaller for us. I hope to see you at one of our webinars down the road.