I’ve taught Beginning Genealogy classes for several years and find that few people who attend these classes are real beginners. On average, people come to Beginning Genealogy after they’ve spent one to five years learning it on their own. They’ve found some records and they’ve found some relatives – but they complain about major brick walls.
In my Beginning Genealogy class, I spend the first class introducing Ancestry.com and the complete set of the U.S. federal censuses. Then we start at the beginning, so to speak, with the 1940 U.S. census where we can collect names, ages, educational level, occupation, employer company, county and state lived in, and whether he had lived in the same place in 1935. We can also see the other people who lived in the same household.
Most people, even those who have done some previous research, are surprised by all the information available on one census. There is even more information available as we step back to the 1930 census which provides information about the people in the household, their ages at their first marriage, their birthplace and the birthplaces of their father and mother, and their citizenship status.
Genealogy is a complex subject which includes developing research skills, learning to read early handwriting, understanding the legal language used in deeds and probate files, learning how the naturalization process worked, and how geography influenced where and how people moved about the country. Every one of these areas of study begins at the beginning. You need to focus on each area of genealogy as a new subject to be explored. And remember, we were all beginners at the beginning.
~ Carol Darrow, Certified Genealogist, teaches a free beginning genealogy class at the downtown Denver Public Library on the second Saturday of the month from 10 am – noon.