Back to School: Assignment 4

I finished assignment 4 for the National Genealogical Society American Genealogy course. Each assignment has an online lecture of sorts, several reading assignments and one or more written tasks. When I say I'm done with assignment 4, it means I've done all of those things.

For this lesson, I had to examine genealogical materials in a library and write a report of what I found. There were specific questions I had to answer.

My nearest library does not have a genealogy department. They barely have a genealogy shelf. It's just a branch library. I could have chosen the Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research, but I decided to pick a library about which I knew very little as a way to challenge myself.

I chose the Montgomery County Memorial Library. Their main branch in Conroe, Texas has a wonderful genealogy department. The NGS assignment required me to look up many different types of materials. In doing so, I was able to learn more about this library and its holdings.

The second part of the assignment was a lesson on citations. In high school, I had MLA drilled into my head. In grad school, APA was forced upon me. Now I have to learn a whole other way to cite sources. It's not difficult, just frustrating to make the adjustment.

Lesson 5 deals with censuses. I think I'll get my first ProGen3 assignment out of the way before I dig in to the census work.