This is the first class in the online Finding Your Family genealogy course. It is a series of six remote classes that we, Daughters of Jacob Genealogy, are teaching to help you begin or expand your efforts to discover your family history. The classes are sponsored by the East Valley JCC (EVJCC) in Chandler, Arizona. Anyone anywhere is invited to participate. The focus will be on searching out one’s Jewish ancestry.
Registration Information: Registration is through the EVJCC at https://eastvalleyjcc.regfox.com/finding-your-family. Registration is for the entire six-class course and costs $60, payable to the EVJCC.
In order to make the best use of your time in class, and fine tune the sessions to your interests, we will be emailing registrants prior to the first class with information and a short questionnaire to help us as we make final preparations for the class. We look forward to working with you!
Course Objectives: This series is for beginning and intermediate genealogists who want to make hands-on progress on a family history project of their own choice. The objectives of the overall six-class course are that by the end of series:
You will have your family tree documented in a format that you can preserve and share
You will have explored sources suitable to your project
You will be comfortable with keeping a record of your searches so you can maximize your research time
You will have (hopefully) found rich new information to attach to your family tree.
Overall Session Formats: Each session will provide information on a selected topic, followed by question and answer, and supported individual work time. Chat will be available throughout each session so that instructors and participants can all make comments and ask questions as we go, in addition to the formal question/answer time. Furthermore, if your technology permits, we encourage you to apply the tools that we present to your own project during each presentation. If you are already familiar with a portion of what we present, we encourage you to go ahead and work on your own project at your own speed during that time while you listen, or help someone else out using the chat feature.
We will hold online office hours for individual help in addition to the regular class sessions. Details TBA.
Session #1: Session #1 will start with the very basics of entering information into paper and online family trees. We will also explore how to search public family trees to see if someone else is working on your lines. If technology permits, we will compare what various online family tree platforms have to offer. You should be leaving Session #1 with a basic family tree that contains information that you already know. If you already have a family tree filled out, you may choose to use this session to fill out a family tree on a different platform, as well, in order to maximize your access to the resources offered by the various platforms.
COVID caveat: At this time, we like much of the world, are transitioning our plans from a face-to-face course to an online course. Thus, the technological features of the course will continue to develop until we approach the actual dates. We appreciate your patience with this process.