A gave myself a couple of tasks to accomplish yesterday before the second session of my genealogy class. The first was to pick up the class packet from the copy center. The second was to pick up a Husky Card for access to the U.W. libraries. Both went swimmingly, so I got to my class early, hung out and read the text book.
The class was taught by James Rigali today. He’s the instructor for the history portions of the class. Topic was Organizing Historical Research Projects. After an overly long and fairly unimportant discussion of what is history?
he delved into a basic method he wanted us to follow:
- Pick a subject. At this point, I’m thinking of doing my project on either or both of my third great grandparents, Patrick Parker and Mary Murphy. (I’ve written about them on the blog before.)
- Create an annotated chronology
- Develop research questions, both historical and genealogical
- Develop a bibliography. His overview included the following types of sources:
- General books, including textbooks.
- Scholarly articles (JSTOR)
- Encyclopedias (he didn’t cover this one too much)
- Historical books and magazines published at the time
- Local histories
- Historical maps
- Historical photographs.
- Newspapers of the time
- History web sites
Sample Research Journal
Keep a research journal. He didn’t really cover what to record on this, other than keeping what he called atwo-sided journal
. In other words, record what you are searching and reading on one side, and notes and thoughts on the other. He didn’t really seem like he’s embraced computer technology like I do.