Bummer! Our speaker was ill this week and had to cancel. We will try to reschedule it soon. In the meantime, I started to re-read her book, The Occasional Genealogist, and started to wonder how I could apply the last speaker’s info and the info from Jennifer’s book.

Both of these speakers are professional genealogists who have other things going on in their lives. I am not a professional genealogist but an educator by trade. I look at their work and compare it to my work as an educator. Here is my take on it:

1. The more parts of our brain we can involve in the learning process, the better chance it will be that we will learn and remember what we are learning. Don’t be a passive learner but rather an active one. Write what you are learning and thinking. Manipulate the thinking moving it around on a chart for example in order to find the best fit for the facts and the new questions that you find.
2. Focusing on one thing at a time is key to successful learning. One problem at a time. As much as they want me to watch a split screen for the Olympics, I can only focus on one of them at a time rather than switching my focus back and forth.
3. It is hard sometimes to quit digging the whole deeper when it needs to be wider if you know what I mean. (My grandmother was a gardener and so was her grandfather). That means I need to look closely at one generation before I move into the next. I may not have all the information I need in order to find the basic facts in the next generation. Don’t shortchange your closest ancestors in order to put more branches on the tree.
4. Find an organizational tool (graphic organizer) that works best for you and the way your mind works so that you can use that part of your brain. Writing is so important for moving things into your long-term memory. If I am not working on family history every day, I need a way to make sure I remember what I have done, where I have looked, what I have found and what I haven’t found so that I don’t waste time repeating my research. It also focuses my critical thinking so that I can remember what I thought I should look into next or what I learned from the research I did.

Looking at that last piece, it could be a narrative, spreadsheet, web, or what we used to call a KWL Chart (Know, What I want to know, What I Learned). I would modify the last to What I Found, What I Didn’t Find, What I Need to Do Next. I would head each of these organizers with a) Date of the research, b) The Research Question, and c) Resource I am Using.

I hope all of that makes sense. Again, I will try to reschedule our last speaker. Watch for that as it may take a while to get it scheduled. In the meantime, lets take a look at what we can find in the Midwest Continent Library which is our next class.

Heidi Geise, education@hqrl.com