My Epiphany at the Tom Jones Genealogy Extravaganza

This weekend I went to Pittsburgh to attend the North Hills Genealogists Fall Conference with Tom Jones and an additional talk by Dr. Jones the previous evening sponsored by the Great Lakes Chapter of the APG.

In two days I heard at least five hours of genealogy lectures:

• Bringing Law to Bear on Complex Genealogical Problems
• Solving the Mystery of the Disappearing Ancestor
• Inferential Genealogy: Deducing Ancestor's Identities Indirectly
• Five Proven Techniques for Finding Your Ancestor's European Origins
• Organizing Evidence to Overcome Record Shortages

Each talk was well organized and I learned something from each one. If you get a chance to hear any of them, you should. My mother found the tips in Organizing Evidence useful. My favorite was Inferential Genealogy (a PDF handout is here) and it was the one that produced the epiphany. I have posted elsewhere about the attitude that some genealogists have towards historians and have been told that "historians don't know what they are doing" regarding genealogy. And while I don't talk about it much, this has given me a bit of a complex about the genealogical research that I do - that somehow I am not doing it right, that my analytical skills somehow don't produce the same results that genealogists do.  

What I learned is that not only am I doing it right, I'm actually really good at it. Historians, like genealogists, never work from a complete data set, no matter what our topic. So we are taught to analyze and evaluate what evidence is available, read how others have interpreted the same or similar evidence, reach and then argue in support of our conclusions. In theory we can take these transferable skills (as opposed our specific regional and time period knowledge) and apply them to other historical problems. Therefore, if I wanted to turn my attention to from Scottish emigration to Song Dynasty China, I know already the steps I would have to take to be successful and the first one would be to learn to read and write Chinese. Regarding family history research, I do have an advantage over historians in other disciplines as I specialize in researching families who migrated during the 18th and 19th centuries; a past career as an architectural historian who did house histories doesn't hurt either. 

So, thanks to Tom Jones, I shall sally forth confident in my skills as a finder of ancestors.