ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’ve attended what’s now been branded the “GRIP Genealogy Institute” a couple of times in the past and found it to be a great “summer camp for genealogists.”

It began as the Genealogy Research Institute of Pittsburgh more than a dozen years ago under the stewardship of Elissa Powell and Deborah Deal before being acquired by the National Genealogical Society in 2023.

In 2019, I was a student in Blaine Bettinger’s beginner course on DNA and genealogy. The course was great but what I learned most clearly was that while I’m conversant now with the overall process and many of the specific tools—I should rely on experts such as Bettinger when I have a genealogy problem needing DNA because I just don’t have the “science brain” for being able to figure out which tools are most appropriate for particular situations.

Last year I took an intermediate German genealogy course from Warren Bittner and Daniel Jones that offered me the chance to hone my skills using tools that are most cogent for researching this ethnic group. While came into this course with a fair bit of knowledge—some of the other students wondered why I wasn’t teaching it—it was money well spent because Bittner and Jones exposed me to a number of new techniques and improved my understanding of some records.

For the GRIP sessions that ended earlier this month, I was both an instructor and a student in a course coordinated by Sunny McClellan Morton titled “Using U.S. Church Records for Family History.”

It was a great time doing a deep dive into church records of different confessions as well as learning about other communities of faith as well as church-related topics such as religious newspapers.

Other courses for the in-person institute (there had been an earlier round of online courses in June) included:

• Advanced DNA Evidence
• Hands-On Genetic Genealogy: Analyzing and Organizing Your DNA
• Introduction to Ashkenazic Jewish Genealogy
• Putting Those Records to Work
• Get Your Hands Dirty! A workshop in Land and Property Records
• Working with Virginia Records from Jamestowne to the Civil War
• Records Loss: Overcoming Destroyed, Missing, or Non-Extant records

Some of these are pretty specialized topics and many of the GRIP attendees are genealogy professionals in some form.

But there were also many hobbyists aboard who simply wanted to gain better mastery of certain skills, as well as some people who just like the bonding and camaraderie of GRIP’s “summer camp” atmosphere.

As for next year? Well, having had a taste of being part of a course faculty, I’m eager to do that again.

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GRIP Genealogy Institute’s 2025 courses will be announced next week! Go to the GRIP website for details at the URL, https://grip.ngsgenealogy.org/