Week 9: I'm Taking a Genealogy Course!

This week’s topic is “Changing Names,” but none of my ancestors are jumping out yelling, “Pick me!  Pick me!”  There are a few I could cover…if I had the motivation, which is sorely lacking at the moment.  My time has been filled with recovering from a recent minor surgery and taking a genealogy class.  I don’t want to skip this week altogether because I need accountability.  Once I skipped a week last year, it was easy to skip another….and another….and another.  I promised myself I’d do better in 2024 and it's only nine weeks in!

So, let’s talk about that genealogy class I’m taking instead!  Boston University offers three online genealogy courses.  The first two classes are each seven weeks long and the third class is an entire 15-week semester.  Despite some well-meaning friends stroking my ego and telling me I probably didn’t need the beginner course – Genealogy Principles – I opted to start there.  I’ve never taken an online class and wanted to set myself up for success rather than frustration and failure.  Everyone has knowledge gaps, and as I explained to people, “There are some things I know I don’t know, and other things I don’t know I don’t know.”  I made the right choice!  I'm familiar with enough of the content that I don’t feel overwhelmed, but there is plenty of new material too.  Even with the familiar concepts, there is always a new-to-me approach. 

The course focuses heavily on best research practices and following the Genealogical Proof Standard, including using the tools to meet those standards like keeping research logs, properly citing sources (which I suck at -- sign me up for a remedial citations course if there is such a thing) and writing proofs.  Topics we’ve covered in the class include mining records for additional information, how to find probate records and what they contain, and how to transcribe documents.  We’ve analyzed vital records, census records, passenger manifests, deeds, and wills.  This week (the sixth week) we’ve learned the steps to creating a research plan and writing a research report.  Our final week will cover DNA.  I’m super excited about that because that’s one of those “things I know I don’t know” areas.

Course structure: There isn’t a set meeting time for the course, but it’s also not considered self-paced because the assignments have set due-dates.  I found the workload takes me anywhere from 8-12 hours/week.  We read a variety of books, articles, and websites, and watch short videos imbedded in the lessons.  So far, each week we’ve been graded on at least one test.  If the thought of multiple-choice, true/false tests make you break out in a cold sweat, fear not, fellow anxiety-ridden test-haters!  You can save your answers and go in and out of the test as many times as you want to look up information.  We’re required to write discussion forum posts as well, but they weren’t graded the first four weeks.  There are plenty of practices exercises throughout, which also aren’t graded.  It would be easy to skip most of them and still wind up with an A in the class, but like anything, you get out of it what you put into it.  What’s the point of an A if you don’t learn anything?  Though tedious at times, the practice exercises are valuable and totally worth doing. 

Pros and cons… there are always some of each, right?  Let’s start with the pros.  We have different instructors and discussion group facilitators for certain parts of the class.  The first 4 weeks we had one, the next two we had another, and we’ll have a different instructor next week when we cover DNA.  I like this approach because each instructor has their own area of expertise.  There is a section on the discussion boards to ask questions and if you take the class, I encourage you to do so.  It’s not a cheap course so you’re literally wasting money if you don’t take advantage of the opportunity to ask these experts.  When we covered probate records, I started delving into my own family research and got stuck.  I found an index. I found a record. I couldn't find the loose court papers that contained the more detailed information I was seeking. I asked a general question about my next steps and gave a link to the record, and the instructor walked me through how to find it in detail.  I was not expecting that!  Thanks to her guidance, I now have the guardianship papers for my great-grandmother and her sisters– a record I didn’t even know existed.  On most weeks, there’s an optional live session (it’s recorded if you can’t make it).  It’s been helpful to listen to a deep dive about what we’ve covered that week.  Since the topic this week is research plans and reports, the instructor went through a step-by-step scenario of a fictional research problem she was hired to solve.  It made all the pieces we learned about it come together for me in a way that reading the lessons and doing the practice assignments hadn’t.  I also appreciate that the instructors are honest with us and aren’t pushing us to immediately jump into the next course 7-week course or the 15-week course.  In fact, our first instructor flat-out told us that she doesn’t recommend the 15-week course for at least a year after we’ve taken this one, reason being that we’ll be more successful if we spend time applying what we’ve learned in this course to our own research. The 15 week-course is apparently equivalent to a college capstone.

Cons: the first four weeks, I was completely frustrated by the discussion posts.  There was plenty of value in the discussion post exercises so they were worth doing, but there were a couple of requirements I found ridiculous.  First off, we couldn’t respond the same way as anyone else.  For example, we might be shown a family on a census and then asked to make an observation about them.  With 30 people in my discussion group, it was at times nearly impossible to come up with a unique perspective, and then when I did, our discussion group facilitator was incredibly nitpicky.  I think part of my problem was our communication styles weren’t compatible.  Second, we were required to respond to two classmates to make it seem like a discussion, but it just felt incredibly fake and forced and not discussion-like at all.  The facilitator responded to everyone, so I found I didn’t have anything more to add to her observations.  I talked to my kids, both of whom are in college, and they said this is just how discussion posts work and I’d have to bullshit my way through the whole “respond to two people” requirement.  The past two weeks have been much better in that regard because the questions haven’t required a unique response, and I feel like I’m meshing better with the second group facilitator.  The only other drawback to the course was a me-problem.  We learned so many new concepts and different research strategies that I kept getting sidetracked from applying them to the practice families.  I wanted to apply them to my own research!  I’d block off a couple hours to work on the course, learn something cool within the first 30-45 minutes, then fall down my own genealogical rabbit hole for four hours before forcing myself back to the task I was supposed to do.

Falling down the rabbit hole and applying what I’ve been learning to my research has yielded some fantastic results, just on the one family line I’ve focused on in my spare time.  I thought I had found all the available records for my Wolf family, but after logging all my previous sources and carefully reading each record, I learned I hadn’t.  I thought I had read each record carefully, but I missed so much valuable information, some of which led me to other records.  During the past six weeks, I’ve found the guardianship records I mentioned previously, church records that show baptisms, confirmations, deaths, and marriages for many members of that family, I found the deed for my 3rd great-grandfather’s house in Brooklyn and I learned that he sold the property to two of his sons shortly before his death (which explains why he didn’t leave a will – I always wondered), and  though I haven’t been able to find a ship manifest for my Wolf family arriving in the US, I found a record index on a German site that shows the family leaving in 1836 – which corresponds with other records I have. 

I was originally going to take the next 7-week session back-to-back with this one, but I miss having the time to do my own research.  Instead, I’m going to take it in the fall or spring and spend the time in between practicing what I’ve learned.  After that, I’ll see.  The 15-week course is a significant time commitment of 25-35 hours/week and preps you to pursue certification.  I haven’t decided yet if that’s something I want to do.  This basic course has been fantastic though, and well worth the money and time I’ve put into it.  As with anything else, your mileage may vary.

Edited to add: I finished the course at the beginning of this week, and feel I need to amend the whole "it took me 8-12 hours/week" statement. Most of the course did take me 8-12 hours/week...until we got to DNA. That section of the course kicked my ass! The instructor outright told us that if we had a lot of experience with DNA, we'd find that section of the course easy, if we didn't, we might struggle a bit. I struggled more than a bit! Pros: it was a super interesting unit. DNA is the area I know the least about and therefore I had the most to learn. Our instructor works as a forensic genealogist solving cold cases. I'm addicted to Investigation Discovery so I found all of that extremely cool. Her live session was helpful and clarified many of the concepts in the book. I learned a lot because as I said, I don't have much experience with DNA. Oh, a dumb thing I liked about this instructor-- during the live session, she made everyone turn their cameras off. I don't have much Zoom experience, and I find it incredibly distracting to see all these people moving around on the side of my screen. Apparently there's a way to hide them, but Alex told me that after the class was done. He gave me one of his "I can't believe my wife is this much of an idiot when it comes to technology" looks and said, "You do know you can set it so only the teacher comes up on your screen, right?" No. That would have been helpful tidbit to know. Cons: this unit contained way too much information to cram into a single week. It easily could have been split into two. Just the amount of reading was overwhelming, and I typically devour books. I had to slow myself down because all the DNA stuff is very technical. And there was so much reading that it was difficult to find time to reread what I read so I'd have a better grasp of it. The instructor said it's not science-heavy and you don't need a background in science to understand it, but there is a lot of math (statistics?) involved. This course didn't get too much into that, but I have a mental block when it comes to the word "math," I freeze up and assume I can't do it. School gave me some serious math-trauma! I worked on this unit probably 5-7 hours/day. I spent 6 1/2 hours on just the test alone. If you're taking this class and have little-no DNA experience, I suggest you start reading the textbook for this unit during the first week to familiarize yourself with the material, and then reread it all Week 7.