A True Vocation

All my life, I have heard and read of people who had a true vocation, a calling to this or that field whether it be medicine or the priesthood or public service, among other fields.  I have rattled around in life looking for mine.  I was not ready when I went to Florida State University in 1965, after graduating from high school.  I have always been an academic overachiever, but I went to university without a clear plan or a clear calling.

I have been a librarian, a nurse, a member of the armed forces.  That latter was for a number of years the closest I have come to feeling that I had a calling  I enjoyed the Coast Guard, and felt like I was part of something that made a difference.  But after that was done, after arthritis took me out of active participation, I felt once again like I did not have a calling.

Another reason I was not ready out of high school to find my vocation was that I had been raised in a traditional family in the 1950s.  Girls were not "supposed" to aspire to more than either being at home or being a secretary, a teacher, or a nurse.  I broke one of those taboos many years into my adulthood by enlisting in the Coast Guard, and I also shattered my family's notion of the character of women in military service.  However, what I had really been discouraged from pursuing was my desire to be a journalist.  Girls just did not do that (never mind Nellie Bly or Margaret Bourke-White or Adela Rogers St. John).  It was a long, long time before I was able to revive that dream.

My first attempt at actually being a writer was in fiction, since I had lost the dream of being a journalist.  I was a member of a local writing group and an online writing group.  I tried various genres and methods, having some short stories published in little magazines, but just not finding a fiction voice.  Then I turned to non-fiction.  After my first book, a history and critical review of a television series, I floundered for subjects, and then I found genealogy.  After getting a genealogical education through the National Institute for Genealogical Studies in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, I then found a subject: a guide to sources for Florida's colonial, territorial, and state censuses.  That book was published last year. 

Work on that book led me to the University of North Florida, first to brush up on my high school Spanish from forty some-odd years before, and then one thing led to another, and I found myself on a path to a second bachelor's degree with a double major in history and Spanish.  Now I am about to finish that up.  I will graduate at the end of the 2012 spring term.  And as I have blogged previously, I will be starting work on a master's degree in history in the fall.

This path has been something strange and wonderful. Associations, opportunities, nearly all my class work has in one way or another led me to study the history and families of St. Augustine, Florida, during the second Spanish period (1784-1821), or has contributed in some way to my investigation.  I have become enchanted with the place and the people -- though some of them at times behaved in less-than-enchanting ways.  But even rascals should have their stories told.  All my education, including the genealogical education, seems to have led up to this area of study.  I feel like I have been taken up by an inexorable current, and cannot escape from it.  Nor do I want to.

I have found my vocation.
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Accredited Online Colleges Blog Advertisement E-Mail

Or:  "Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam," to quote Monty Python.

Like Bill West, of West in New England, I also received a spam mail from an outfit calling itself Accredited Online Colleges.  The e-mail read:

>We at Accreditedonlinecolleges.com recently came across your blog and were excited to share with you an article. "50 Places to Find Your Family History Online” was recently published on our blog at [link deleted] and we hoped that you would be interested in featuring or mentioning it in one of your posts. Please let us know if you have any concern."

>Unlike Bill, who has more self-restraint than I have, I did click the link because I am curious.  Dangerous, perhaps, but I have this thing about wanting to check stuff out. (My husband is a certified computer security pro, so we have firewalls and other stuff out the yang on our computers, so I feel reasonably protected.)  I have a lot of concerns. Sorry, guys, but you're not going to be terribly happy with what I have to say.

First off, they "came across [my] blog," no doubt, by sending out a 'bot looking for genealogy blogs, the authors of which -- like Bill and me -- would become targets for their advertisement e-mail.  Their unsolicited commercial e-mail.  Their spam.

Their list is divided into sections.  The sites they mentioned in the first section, "General," included some of the best-known such as RootsWeb and Ancestry.com.  However, their blurbs were too short, carried little real information, and did not do the reader the service of distinguishing between paid sites and free sites.

The next section, "Search," included FamilySearch.org -- twice.  These directed the user to two different interfaces for the same website.  That's not quite cricket, lads.  Now you're really down to 49.  This section also included some "gathering" sites -- use our site to find other sites that you could probably find on your own and that if you've been doing online genealogy any time at all you probably know about already, anyway.  Not terribly useful to the more experienced genealogical researcher, and not really the best thing to which to send the novice.

Much of the rest of the list included a lot of these types of sites, some of which I would not trust any farther than I could throw Microsoft's offices.  (Hint:  That's not very doggone far.)  At many of these sites, the trap is that you get to enter your information for the search, and will have returned to you nothing but index information. If you want the actual document, or more detailed information, you will have to pay for it.  I'd be rather wary of giving some of these folks my credit card information.

These sites say that they will get you documents.  Nope.  They get you index information, nothing more.  Unless, of course, you wish to pay for it (which is reasonable, but you can pay for it by contacting the vital records office of the pertinent state or county or town yourself, and you will learn more genealogical methodology in the process)

As we go further down this list, we find RootsWeb is also listed twice.  Now you're down to 48 and this is getting close to false advertising (50 sites?  Nope).

Another trick they use is to direct searchers to a part of a government website, such as eVetRecs on the National Archives and Records Administration website.  Again, the blurb that Accredited Online Colleges' blogger posted is too brief and does not give enough information -- such as the fact that eVetRecs can only be used by a veteran himself or herself, or the veteran's legal heirs, to order military records.  Other orders must be placed using the paper forms provided by NARA.

Another recommended site could give a novice the wrong impression.  They refer the user to the site Make Your Coat of Arms, which proclaims that anyone can "easily create and print out on your printer your unique family or personal coat of arms (or family crest) based on your family ancestry or on the values that are important to you and your family today."  Now, this is not to dissuade anyone from going to the site and having fun creating something that is perhaps meaningful or even just silly fun, but no one should take this seriously, because an actual historical coat of arms can only be bestowed by the recognized arms-granting body of a country which recognizes coats of arms as rewards for particular gallantry and service to that country.  The United States is NOT one of those countries.

Oh, yes, they got to my orthography button by referring to Interment.net as Internment.  Sorry -- interment is what we do to our dead; internment is what the U.S. Government did to its Japanese-American population during World War II.  

There are a number of other, more reliable, sources of information about where to go to begin your genealogy searches, or to continue them.  One place to start is with Cyndi's List, which is not mentioned.  Another good starting place or refresher for the experienced is RootsWeb's Guide to Tracing Your Family Tree, which is not mentioned on the Accredited Online College blog's list, either.  

Another good place, of course, to find good information on beginning or continuing genealogical research is to read genealogy blogs!  Thank you for reading mine.

The Delinquent Blogger

I regret that I have neglected my blog of late, but it is the last month of the term at university. I have one paper done, another monster of a paper due in rough draft next week, a take-home exam in Spanish, and my ongoing St. Augustine project.

It is also time to do taxes, which I should have done before this, but there it is. Ah, well.

I've even been so wrapped up in my academic pursuits that I've missed the last three episodes of "Who Do You Think You Are?" But I can catch up with that on Hulu.

After the term is over, I'll still be fairly busy. I have two speaking engagements lined up for the month of May, and another in July. I've even had an inquiry about a gig next year! Also, fairly soon now, our genealogical society will be offering a many-part course for beginning family historians -- though the education chair isn't sure about HOW many parts there will be yet. I'll be teaching some of the classes in that series.

So I may not be here on the blog as much as I would like for the month of April, but I'll be back in May, much more often.
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First review (I just HAVE to BRAG!)

The first review of my new book, Non Federal Censuses of Florida, 1784-1945: A Guide to Sources, was published in the (Jacksonville) FloridaTimes-Union 28 February 2010. I had the paper, but had not made use of it yet (that use being to cut out grocery coupons!). The online version of the review is here.

I like it. The reviewer calls it a "must-have" book. Problem is, books issued by my publisher, McFarland, usually don't appear in book stores, as they sell through the jobbers that service public and academic libraries, and do direct-order through their website. Maybe I should contact the local Barnes & Noble and see if they want to arrange a signing?

In other news, I made a presentation this morning for my genealogical society, the Southern Genealogists Exchange Society, to a small class (N=10) of my talk which I call "Bare Bones: Getting Started in Your Genealogy." It's a stepping stone to the six-week-long class the Education Chair is planning (and in which I probably will be teaching some of the units) to be announced later this year. When asked whether "Who Do You Think You Are" influenced their attendance at the class, only one raised her hand. WDYTYA is a great thing to have on TV, but the interest is already there for a lot of folks, apparently. And that, too, is a good thing.
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Getting Genealogy Into the Academy

I have come to be of the opinion, in the last few years of my serious pursuit of genealogy as a profession, that genealogy is a social science and should be classified with the other social sciences on an equal footing. Genealogy has its own theoretical base, propounded by Donald Lines Jacobus and Val D. Greenwood. It has its own methodology, made more rigorous by the work of Elizabeth Shown Mills and others. And it produces -- and has for many years -- academic-level work product in professional journals.

And we're getting there. Boston University has recently begun offering coursework in genealogy, though not yet a degree (and, of course, Brigham Young University has been offering a degree in genealogy for decades in an ever-improving program). And there are individuals out there who are both qualified historians and certified genealogists, and who are breaking new ground in combining the sources and methodology of genealogy with the pursuit of historical inquiry of academic quality.

One of these is Carolyn Earle Billingsley, with whose work I became familiar today, when my copy of her book Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier arrived. I found out about the book last week, through a curious set of circumstances which had put me on a similar path as Dr. Billingsley, though on a smaller scale, before I knew about her work.

As I am down to the wire with my present book, Non-Federal Censuses of Florida, 1784-1945: A Guide to Sources, I was casting about for an idea for a subsequent book. I really cannot describe the process by which I arrived at this idea. I'm not sure myself how it happened, as the events of the past couple weeks have been fast and furious. Anyway, about two weeks ago, while I was crossing the campus of the University of North Florida on my way to a quiet uninterrupted morning of study in the library, I saw a sign announcing an undergraduate research grant. I inquired into it and decided to apply, but needed a subject.

At times, we have various ideas amorphously formed in the back brain, where they stew and percolate, and come pouring out in what seems a concatenation of events pushing us in a particular direction. That is what is operating here. I am at UNF studying history and Spanish, and having taken two courses in learning how to read very old Spanish documents, because I have decided based purely on my location to study the old Spanish lineages of Florida. I wrote my book on the colonial, territorial, and state censuses of Florida as a means of familiarizing myself with the extant sources in my area. So to apply for the research grant, I thought I would take a genealogical approach to the history of St. Augustine during the second Spanish period (1783-1820). I want my approach to be one not often used -- to first establish the family relationships of the population of St. Augustine, and then examine the historical events during that thirty-seven year period through the lens of those family relationships.

In perusing the literature as part of preparing my grant application, and as part of a personal inquiry into further educational opportunities for myself, I came across mention of Dr. Billingsley's book. I ordered it from Amazon.com. Turns out that my idea is quite similar to hers.

Dr. Billingsley studied the kinship of one family, and its allied lines, through a longer period of tiem over a larger geographic area, but the basic idea of studying history though the lens of genealogy is the same for her as it is for me. I read the introduction of her book today (I'm home in the process of becoming increasingly miserable through the process of having a cold), and with every paragraph, I liked the lady more and more. She and I are thinking along extremely similar lines! It's exciting.

The professor I have chosen to direct me in my study, as the grant will be used in a directed individual study next term, is the professor who taught the paleography courses. He seems to think I have a solid idea with considerable potential, and is on board with the genealogical angle of it. This is a logical approach for colonial St. Augustine, as kinship ties were very important to the Spanish in those days (not to say they are not important today).

Well, it's quite a feeling being a pioneer.
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