Last week was a busy week. I attended the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh (GRIP) for the entire week (virtually) and learned lots.
One of the items on my education plan is to learn more about how to study and incorporate social history into my research and family stories. So when I saw that GRIP was going to be virtual again this year, and that Gena Phillibert-Ortega would be teaching Beyond a Name & Date: Advanced Practices in Social History, I jumped at the opportunity to dive deep into this topic. And, of course, I was not disappointed.
The projects I have in mind revolved mainly around my immigrant ancestors, especially my Germans. I want to understand what motivated them to emigrate, what their travel experience was like, what life was like after immigrating, how they assimilated to the American way of life, what urban life was like for them in Chicago, and what they experienced during times of anti-German sentiment.
I got plenty of ideas regarding those questions…and so much more. I even took the opportunity to build a research plan for one of my projects during the course as my homework assignment, and I can’t wait to start working on it. (Want to get a behind-the-scenes look at me building this plan? Check out my YouTube video!)
Gena and Gideon Hill were the two main instructors, and they were both fabulous. This was my first virtual GRIP and as far as I could tell, everything ran smoothly (kudos to the GRIP team). My only complaint would be that the sessions weren’t recorded, which normally wouldn’t have affected me, except that I missed the majority of a session due to a Zoom outage (sessions were going on just fine, it was getting into the rooms that became the problem), and of course the one I missed was Judy Russell’s lecture on immigration and naturalization (Did you catch my main project objectives above? LOL). Despite that, all was good, and I highly recommend this course for anyone who wants to learn more about how to research and incorporate social history into their genealogy.
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© Julie Tarr. This article was first published at Julie’s Genealogy & History Hub; appearance of this article elsewhere, without my permission, violates copyright.
