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Friday, July 26, 2019

Who Needs Standards?

From the website of Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG) in discussing the need for their book on standards: 

"Genealogy Standards begins with the simple fact that accuracy is fundamental to genealogical research. Without it, a family’s history would be fiction. That first edition of the manual presented the standards family historians use to obtain valid results, updated, clarified, consolidated, and expanded for the 21st century, and tied more directly to the Genealogical Proof Standard."

"This new 2019 second edition reflects the fact that the practice of genealogy is not static, but evolves as new developments and technologies emerge. Genealogy’s standards must keep pace also. Responding to this decade’s spate of advancements in the practice of genetic genealogy, BCG has modified four existing standards and added seven new standards to guide the use of DNA evidence in genealogical analysis. BCG also has updated the Genealogist’s Code to address the protection of individuals who provide DNA samples. New terms added to the glossary reflect the specialized language associated with DNA evidence."

This is a unique course for advanced practitioners. 

Most courses and lectures approach genealogy standards from the perspective of how to meet standards and how to produce work that meets standards. 
During this course—a supervised practical application of Genealogy Standards—the students will be the judges. 
This is a forum for discussion of each standard and for substantive genealogy questions. Each day the students will evaluate genealogical work samples of unknown quality to determine whether the samples meet, partially meet, or do not meet standards. 
From these exercises we hope that the students will gain insight into the mindset and the habits involved in consistently producing work that meets standards. We hope that the students will develop evaluation strategies to identify weaknesses in their writing and in the writing of others. 
This course will be a forum for discussions of each standard and for substantive genealogy questions.
Why are standards necessary? To produce reliable and accurate genealogical products ... not works of fiction.
To learn more about the course and to register, go here.

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