ROOTS & BRANCHES

As people who know me well have heard, I was not born a natural public speaker (there’s even an incident in which I caused to be “lost” a collage about which I was supposed to speak in front of the class in fifth or sixth grade).

And while I never expect to become the most natural public speaker, I have managed to make a bit of my living talking to genealogy audiences during the past 20-plus years.

What was the turning point? Well, it started when somehow I was convinced to give one 30-minute talk as part of a larger day of lectures. I was terrified and memorized the whole talk. And there was an epiphany when it was over: I had not died; the audience had not revolted; perhaps I could do this again?

My next foray into speaking was putting together a continuing education course for Harrisburg Area Community College’s Lebanon Campus, which was close to where I then lived. The continuing ed director was an infectiously enthusiastic guy named Reid Smalley and the course got a nice registration.

This was in 1991.

When I came across the syllabus for this course recently, I knew this was an opportunity to take stock of what’s changed and what’s stayed the same in the last quarter century in the world of genealogy.

I was struck by the titles I had used for the individual class sessions as well as the order in which I talked about various topics:

• “Getting Started: Study Yourself – and Then Head for the Attic”
• “The First Stop: A Trip to a Library (or Two)
• “Your Day in Court: What’s in the Lebanon County Courthouse”
• “Filling in the Details: Other Records and Special Problems”
• “Making the Trans-Atlantic Connection”

None of those topics should be absent from a course of study on genealogy today. But, of course, there are two key words missing: “Internet” and “DNA.”

Now, there’s a very good reason that neither the Internet nor DNA were part of any genealogy conversation. The WorldWideWeb that made the Internet into a household tool was only starting up in 1991; genealogical applications of DNA were still some years away.

There were some fairly primitive genealogical database programs for storing your data, which (interestingly, to me, at least) have come and now mostly gone with today’s trend toward storage of data “in the cloud” and through online family trees rather than on individual computers.

Despite the profound additions to the genealogy toolbox, there are still many concepts that are tried in true in genealogy – as well as pitfalls to which genealogy, poorly done, can fall victim … some that are even magnified by the computer age.

An example we’ll talk about next time goes back to the children’s game of “rumor.”