• Announcement # 1:  The course will not meet on the first Monday of the semester due to the Martin Luther King holiday.  Have a good "mini-break."  I look forward to meeting you during the following week!
   
• Announcement # 2:  HOWEVER, there will be a two-part assignment for that first class period:
  
  (1)  Purchase and give a cursory reading to Genealogy Online for Dummies which, despite its highly unacademic title, will serve as the principal text in this course.  

Don’t worry about mastering any particular information in the text.   At this point, all I would ask is that you form some idea of the kind  of sources available for doing this type of history. 

(2)  Start compiling information about your family history.  (You should start this assignment, if at all possible, while you are still at home.)

It is a cardinal rule of genealogy that research begins at home.

Consequently, begin by talking to relatives, in particular your parents and grandparents.  Using these initial contacts, gather and record any information you can:  names of relatives, dates and places of birth and/or death, dates of marriages, information concerning physical appearance, places they lived, their employment, military or public service. 

Click on the following for Questions you might want to ask.

In short, anything you can find and which might supply clues as to where to look for more information.  Genealogy is a historical puzzle for which you must gather and put together the pieces. 

And don't worry if you can't discover everything you hoped to find this semester.  Genealogy is also an on-going process and this class is a beginning, not an end.