Family History and Cultural Heritage

As the calendar turns another page to reveal a new month, The National Institute for Genealogical Studies is preparing to open the next round of online courses for family historians and genealogists on the first Monday of the month. Various organizations have set October as Family History Month or Heritage Month for numerous Ethnic backgrounds. It reflects a growing interest in exploring our cultural roots and a desire to discover more about our Heritage.

Many of our courses are designed to teach research methodology and where to find relevant resources, but we also have courses that explore the historical and cultural aspects of the regions and peoples you may be researching. Our country-themed Certificate packages focus on all aspects of research in a specific country. A list of certificates can be found on our website.

When you choose one of the certificates, a list of the compulsory courses will appear directly below, with all other courses listed under Electives. Choosing a different certificate will display its compulsory courses. This is a good way to see which courses are specific to a particular certificate program and which courses are compulsory for more than one certificate.

TIP: Choose compulsory courses from a second certificate as electives and completed two certificates at once.

Valuable Courses for Researching Your Cultural Heritage
Demystifying Culture & Folklore
Life of Our Ancestors
Research: Grandmothers, Mothers & Daughters-Tracing Women
Research: Social History

Whether it is Autumn or Spring for you, ENJOY the month of October! Be grateful for all you have discovered on your genealogical journey so far. Use family holidays such as Thanksgiving as opportunities to ask about food traditions and how holidays were celebrated in the past. Ask family members about their memories and if they have photos. Seek out your family history stories and dig a little deeper to discover your cultural heritage as well. Names, Dates and Places are a great start (and we need them!), but don’t stop there. Find the rest of your family’s story. It is YOUR Heritage. Preserve it – so you can pass it down to the next generation.

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The National Institute for Genealogical Studies offers quality online education with over 230+ courses to choose from. Some of our courses are topic/country-specific, or provide insight into research methodology, while others are skill-building courses to maximize your research time. The first Monday of a new month means another rotation of courses will start on October 4th. Most courses feature 6 modules over an 8-week period, easily adapted to most busy schedules. Many courses have been bundled into packages to provide discount options. Take a look at our course calendar and see which courses will accomplish your genealogical education goals. Register today!
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Visit our website for a complete list of online courses offered by The National Institute for Genealogical Studies. Check our Course Calendar here.
Follow us on Social Media: Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest.
*Note: Please be aware our social media accounts are monitored regularly, but NOT 24/7. If you have any questions, please contact the office directly.

Contact information:
1 (800) 580-0165
Email: admin@GenealogicalStudies.com
Website: www.GenealogicalStudies.com
Blog: blog.GenealogicalStudies.com

LEADERS IN ONLINE GENEALOGY EDUCATION since 1997

Transcription Tuesday: Handwriting

One of the very first basic skills to develop as a Transcriber is learning to read various handwriting scripts. Start with modern day cursive handwriting. If you cannot master every day current handwriting styles, you will really struggle with older scripts. Practice reading whenever you can. Read handwriting from different people. Everyone develops their own style. Learn to write in cursive yourself. It is a skill that will help you as you are trying to decipher handwritten documents. Soon you will be tackling more difficult handwriting on older documents.

These are a few quick examples. The top one is an address from 1891. The first word “Davenport” is not too difficult. Knowing it was an address, helps us to figure out that the second word is “Road.” For this word, the “a” is clear and the “d” will become familiar with its upward curl. The “Ro” is more difficult. The word directly below it is “Richard” and has the same “R” at the beginning. The other two names beside it are both “W^m” – the abbreviation for William. They can look different, depending on who is writing it. These names are from Ontario Birth Registrations in 1880.

The third example is a record from the Drouin Collection in 1791. The handwriting can be quite challenging, especially if the record is in French or Latin! Deciphering the text is compounded when having to translate from an unfamiliar language. If you are researching records in a language you do not understand, the Family Search Genealogical Word Lists will be very helpful to you.

Another useful website is the Brigham Young University (BYU) Tutorial – Making Sense of Old Handwriting. You should bookmark it and explore the resources as you begin to develop your Transcription Skills. We will explore more aspects of reading old handwriting in next week’s Transcription Tuesday.
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Remember: Transcribing takes practice and patience.
Check back next week for more skill-building tips.
Previous Transcription Tuesday blog posts:
Census Names
Transcription Definition
Transcription Tuesday Index
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These three core courses demonstrate Transcription principles. They are offered monthly, beginning on the first Monday of every month: Register today!
Methodology-Part 2: Organizing and Skill-Building (Basic Level)
Skills: Transcribing, Abstracting & Extracting (Basic Level)
Palaeography: Reading & Understanding Historical Documents (Advanced)
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Visit our website for a complete list of online courses offered by The National Institute for Genealogical Studies. Check our Course Calendar here.
Follow us on Social Media: Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest.
*Note: Please be aware our social media accounts are monitored regularly, but NOT 24/7. If you have any questions, please contact the office directly.

Contact information:
1 (800) 580-0165
Email: admin@GenealogicalStudies.com
Website: www.GenealogicalStudies.com
Blog: blog.GenealogicalStudies.com

LEADERS IN ONLINE GENEALOGY EDUCATION since 1997

British Home Child Day

The National Institute for Genealogical Studies offers a number of courses covering immigration, emigration and migration. For some of our ancestors and extended family members, they seldom stayed in the same place for multiple generations. These major, life-changing decisions were made as a result of multiple factors, which varied dramatically depending on their unique situations. For some young migrants, these decisions were made for them. This is true for the Child Migration schemes from Britain. We have designed a course which specifically explores this topic.

Research: Child Migration from Britain
From the Course Description:
This course provides an overview of the history of child migration from Britain and an introduction to the records that can be accessed to research them. Britain has a very long history of exporting children. Child migration from Britain occurred over a period of nearly 350 years through various private and government sponsored emigration schemes. This course is a good starting point for anyone who knows, or even suspects, that they have a British child migrant ancestor in their family tree. Children were sent to the American Colonies, the West Indies, Australia, Canada, Southern Rhodesia, South Africa and New Zealand. The major recipients of children, based upon numbers, were Canada and Australia. The course is structured to address research in each of the receiving countries, in Britain and from the sending agencies themselves. The course concludes with a case study which uses a child who migrated to Canada during a time period when child migration to Canada was near its peak.
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One of these schemes was for the British Home Children. This was a difficult time period and impacted many families – for both those who were sent to a new land and those who were left behind. The young migrants sent to Canada are covered in Modules 2 and 6 of this course.

On September 28th, we remember the estimated 100,000 children who were sent out to Canada to find a better life than what they were leaving behind. This date was declared by the Government of Canada as explained here in the announcement for the British Home Child Day Act, 2011.

To begin your British Home Children Research, start by checking these web pages:
Home Children, 1869-1932 – Library and Archives Canada (LAC)
Canada Home Children British Sources (National Institute) – FamilySearch Wiki
Canada Home Children Bibliography and Suggested Reading (National Institute) – FamilySearch
Canada Home Children – FamilySearch Wiki

Be sure to check out our research course: Child Migration from Britain. The next course is scheduled to start on October 4, 2021. Check the course calendar for course schedule after this date.

Find out if there were any child migrant schemes to the regions where you are researching. If you are trying to place someone, who was born in England during this time frame, who shows up individually in an established family household with a different surname, and doesn’t seem to fit into the local families, try looking for a child migrant, especially if they are working as a domestic or a farm labourer. Then take the time to document their story. Perhaps, you will be the one who connects that distant family member, and enables them to discover what happened to that little one, who left the family for a far-off land so long ago. Many are not forgotten; they are only disconnected with their British roots.
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Visit our website for a complete list of online courses offered by The National Institute for Genealogical Studies. Check our Course Calendar here.
Follow us on Social Media: Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest.
*Note: Please be aware our social media accounts are monitored regularly, but NOT 24/7. If you have any questions, please contact the office directly.

Contact information:
1 (800) 580-0165
Email: admin@GenealogicalStudies.com
Website: www.GenealogicalStudies.com
Blog: blog.GenealogicalStudies.com

LEADERS IN ONLINE GENEALOGY EDUCATION since 1997

Transcription Tuesday: Transcription Definition

As part of the online skill-building education at The National Institute for Genealogical Studies, new students, as well as professional genealogists, learn the importance of Transcribing every document they discover in their family research. Although it may take extra effort to make a transcription, the benefits will soon be apparent. How often have you left a document written in an older script for a few days, and when you returned to your research, you found that you needed to decipher the handwriting again?

The first step is to make a copy of the original document and put it away. This is especially true for those of fragile materials. By using this copy to make a transcription, the text of a document can be worked on, while avoiding the wear and tear of the original document. Never write on an original; copies of documents can be marked with notes, highlighters, and notations for further examination and research, preserving the original document. First, let’s look at a definition.

What is a Transcription?
A transcription is a true, word-for-word rendering of a document with the original punctuation and spelling (i.e., an exact copy of the original, line by line, sentence by sentence, word by word, and letter by letter). All notes and marks on any page are copied as faithfully as possible in the presented formatting. It includes all spellings, capitalizations and punctuations as it was written. No corrections are made to spelling or capitalization. It includes the whole record—front and back, with all its headings, insertions, endorsements, notations, etc.

By transcribing everything on a document, we don’t miss those important clues. We can have a tendency to skim over long blocks of text, or those oh-so-familiar boilerplate sections. By doing so, you could miss that slightly different instruction, or that note tucked in the middle of the text.

Transcribing forces us to record every single word (and symbol!) and explore why it was included, or used in that fashion. Transcriptions take obscure handwriting and reveal the contents in “plain English,” making it much easier to read and to tease out the finer details needing to be clarified. It can be a challenge, don’t give up!

Sometimes, handwriting really does need letter-by-letter deciphering. Many letters can look the same; some letters may even be illegible. Some letters just need time. If they have you stuck, walk away and come back with fresh eyes – an hour later, or the next day. It is amazing how you can see it so clearly the next time. When having difficulty with a particular word, count how many letters there are. Use blanks (like in hangman) and try to figure out the word that could fit in the context of that sentence. Sometimes, it is like solving a coded message.

Don’t change any spelling, even when it varies on the same page. There was no “A” for correct spelling – they often wrote phonetically. Try speaking it out loud (and with a strong accent!). Don’t expand abbreviations, especially for names. Ed^d could be Edward or Edmund. Keep the original capitalizations (or lack of), and keep the punctuation exactly the same. Often personal letters are written as one long sentence!

These are just a few tips to start. You can develop your Transcription Skills – it just takes practice and patience. See the list of our core Transcription courses below.
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Check back next week for more skill-building tips.
Previous Transcription Tuesday blog post:
Transcription Tuesday
Transcription Tuesday Index
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These three core courses demonstrate Transcription principles. They are offered monthly, beginning on the first Monday of every month: Register today!
Methodology-Part 2: Organizing and Skill-Building (Basic Level)
Skills: Transcribing, Abstracting & Extracting (Basic Level)
Palaeography: Reading & Understanding Historical Documents (Advanced)
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Visit our website for a complete list of online courses offered by The National Institute for Genealogical Studies. Check our Course Calendar here.
Follow us on Social Media: Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest.
*Note: Please be aware our social media accounts are monitored regularly, but NOT 24/7. If you have any questions, please contact the office directly.

Contact information:
1 (800) 580-0165
Email: admin@GenealogicalStudies.com
Website: www.GenealogicalStudies.com
Blog: blog.GenealogicalStudies.com

LEADERS IN ONLINE GENEALOGY EDUCATION since 1997

Writing Our Family Stories

Our Family History is filled with names, dates, places, and the discoveries of our families’ involvement in historical events. Most importantly, it is filled with STORIES! Stories that need to be recorded and preserved, and then shared, not only with our own family members, but also with others who may have similar connections, or just want to learn the history of their communities. Many of our stories involve the social history of our ancestors. They tell of countless everyday lives and the activities that they participated in, as they interacted within their neighbourhoods and family relationships.

We uncover mysteries and heroism, courage and perseverance, tragedies and triumphs, love and loss – stories stranger than fiction, and stories we have never heard before, because they were never passed down. These stories are the real reason we continue researching – to find the why, and the where, and the how of our ancestors’ lives. We must find…. the rest of the story! We become the caretakers of those stories, and we have a responsibility to ensure they are preserved. They are our Heritage.

At The National Institute for Genealogical Studies, it is our goal to provide genealogical-related educational materials to assist family historians and researchers to expand their skills, not only for research, but in many areas. Methodology is foundational; and knowing where to locate essential documents is absolutely vital. However, our online courses cover a vast array of other topics related to documenting our family history.

One of those areas is Writing. It is so important to not only document our findings, but we must write them out as well. Otherwise, they may be lost again to the next generation. Our family stories must be thoroughly researched, verified, drafted into sharable narratives, and then written into a final project. This can be in the form of simple ancestor profiles, detailed research reports, family history books, or a variety of other formats. The choices will be as varied as the families they represent.

Family History Projects take on new life through the creative insights of their authors. Their only limitation is the necessary skills needed to take their idea and transform it into their vision for the final product. This is where The National Institute’s courses assist them in developing these skills to achieve their goals. Listed below are some of our courses dealing with the gathering those stories and the genealogical writing skills involved to preserve them.

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The National Institute for Genealogical Studies offers 230+ online courses on a wide variety of topics, providing genealogical education for those interested in beginning to research their family history, as well as professional genealogists.

These featured courses are related to this blog post:
Demystifying Culture & Folklore
Discover Your Family History
Genealogy and Copyright Guidelines
Life of Our Ancestors
Personal Historian: Telling the Stories
Research: Social History
Skill-Building: Nuts & Bolts of Reporting Research
Writing for Genealogy: Articles, Blogs, Research Reports and so much more
Writing the Genealogist’s Memoir
Writing Your Family History Book

A new rotation of courses begins on the first Monday of every month. Check our Course Calendar to discover which courses are scheduled to begin next month. To find out when a specific course begins, check under the Register tab for that course.
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Visit our website for a complete list of online courses offered by The National Institute for Genealogical Studies. Check our Course Calendar here.
Follow us on Social Media: Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest.
*Note: Please be aware our social media accounts are monitored regularly, but NOT 24/7. If you have any questions, please contact the office directly.