Showing posts with label BCG Standards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BCG Standards. Show all posts

Saturday, March 28, 2015

Genealogical Evidence Got You Stymied? Can’t Put Your Thoughts in Order for that Report?




Then Come on Down to the Putting Skills to Work BCG Ed Fund Workshop

Tuesday, 12 May 2015, 8:30 AM–4:30 PM
(That’s the day before the NGS 2015 Conference)

St. Charles, Missouri

And Let Elissa and Barbara Give You Some Ideas About How to End that Confusion!

Ever go to conferences and see the presenter do magical things, but then when you sit down yourself, you find it isn’t that easy? Putting Skills to Work is a unique full-day, hands-on workshop limited to sixty participants. The focus is practicing skills needed by anyone who does serious genealogical research whether as a family historian, librarian, dedicated hobbyist, or writer. Materials are geared to intermediate and advanced practitioners and advocate established genealogy standards.

It’s only $110.

The registration fee includes lunch, both in-depth presentations complete with hands-on exercises, syllabus, handouts, and active class participation. NGS Conference registration is not required. You can go just to the workshop – you don’t have to cross-register to go to the conference.
To register for the workshop, pick the choice that describes your registration status:
 
Elissa Scalise Powell, CG, CGL, will lead the session “Tested Strategies for Efficient Research Reports.” If you’ve found writing research reports (whether to paid clients or to your own files) painful, then this is the class for you. Many researchers assume committing research findings to paper is separate from the research process; however, Elissa will share her methodology for using available time efficiently during the research process, resulting in a sharable work product. 

“Tested Strategies for Research Report” will allow each participant to experience (not just observe) an efficient process for making the research report a part of the research cycle. Writing “as you go” saves genealogists the pain of creating a report after the thrill of the chase is complete. Each of us wants to be more efficient in our research and more proficient in our report writing whether for a client or for our own family and files. Without writing down your research plan, analysis, and conclusions, you or future generations may very well repeat them needlessly. Communicating our findings is at the crux of all we do.

Elissa Scalise Powell, CG, CGL, is immediate past-president of the Board for Certification of Genealogists. She is co-director of the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh (GRIP), instructs for Boston University’s Genealogical Research Certificate course and at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy. She is coordinator of the Professional Genealogy course for the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research at Samford University. She has extensive experience as a forensic genealogist in mineral rights cases.


Barbara Jean Mathews, CG, FASG, will lead the session “Evidence Analysis, Correlation, and Resolution: The Heart of the Genealogical Proof Standard.” Focusing on only direct evidence creates unnecessary research dead ends. This session addresses weighing and correlating sources, evidence, and information in their many diverse forms for successful resolution of investigations. We will take a family living in the U.S., and work until we know where in Denmark they came from. Where will we look for them? What do the records in Texas tell us about the family? As we go through the documents we’ll ask ourselves new questions and move to new areas of research, much as we would in the world outside the classroom.

We will also evaluate indirect and fuzzy evidence, working together to resolve those issues. So many areas of the U.S. have few records but that doesn’t mean that we can’t make intelligent inferences about family relationships. 

Barbara mentored ProGen Studies Group 7, and GenProof Studies Group 6. She currently mentors ProGen Studies Group 21 and NGSQ Study Group B. She is a substitute instructor for the Boston University genealogical certificate program. She has extensive experience as a lineage genealogist analyzing documents from across the U.S., from the present back to colonial times.

So please join us for a fun day of experiential skill-building and take home ideas and processes that work and help to make us more efficient with our time and money.

Why a confused kitten? It gets people’s attention. This one is from Microsoft and is used under license.

Credit for this posting also goes to Kathy Gunter Sullivan, CG, who posted notices on the BCG Ed Fund page http://bcgcertification.org/educationfund/index.html and as a BCG SpringBoard blog post http://bcgcertification.org/blog/2014/12/bcg-education-fund-workshop-at-ngs-st-charles-12-may-2015/ .

UPDATE 1: Cost after Early Bird registration changed to reflect the fact that the workshop is not subject to a change.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Objects in the Mirror Are Not Authoritative: The "Indirect Citation"



Earlier I updated the Homer and Charry ahnentafel entries with citations to church and vital records indexes. Each of these citations noted what the index stated about where to find the original record. I write as I research. This indirect citation is thus an interim step. If an index provides a volume and page number, I put it in the working citation. If a book cites gravestones or vital records, I quote the book's information in the footnote. This is a useful habit for the "res-write" process,[1] that is, synchronized research and writing, because it stores that interim step. The next research step is to use that index information to find the original record.

Sadly enough, if I am working on my family, I sometimes go no farther than the indirect citation. Connecticut is my specialty area and my family's origins. It is in Connecticut that the massive Barbour index to vital records to 1850 tempts me every time. I can do four Barbour look-ups in the time it takes to mount a microfilm reel and view the record itself. If I viewed it, I could cite it. But I don't view it so that citation stays indirect and quotes the slip index citing the location.

The credibility of my work product would improve if I went to the vital records (or their microfilm copies) every time. As genealogical standards state, "The original is the most authoritative source."[2] Not much room for argument there.


[1] This is a term I coined for my speech "Research and Reporting the Right Way -- Together!"  It reminds me of Research-Write/Right, which I like.
[2] Board for Certification of Genealogists, The BCG Genealogical Standards Manual (Washington, D.C.: Board for Certification of Genealogists, 2000), Standard 21, pp. 8-9.