Come join us on Tuesday, June 15 at 7:00 – 8:00pm, to listen to a professional recording of a lecture by Professor John Philip Colletta, titled How to Build Historical Context. The program will be introduced by Dennis Partridge, and this month we will be using a different technology, called Google Meet. Please use the following link to login. No pre-registration is needed.Video call link: https://meet.google.com/eea-ywfj-htnOr dial: (US) +1 413-758-2715 PIN: 804 988 470#​ Professor John Philip Colletta is one of America’s most popular genealogical lecturers. He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America. He is a faculty member of the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama; the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy; and Boston University’s Genealogical Research Program. Professor Colletta also has been an instructor and course coordinator for the National Institute on Genealogical Research, the Genealogical Institute of Texas, and the Genealogical Institute of Mid-America.  How to Build Historical ContextThe lives of your ancestors provide all of the elements of engaging true stories. The challenge is to narrate the facts you’ve discovered within the larger physical and temporal world in which they were once lived events. If you want to get to know your ancestors, you must see them as real people living in a particular place at a particular time. In other words, the biographical facts you gather must be situated in their proper historical context. As we build historical context in this lecture, you’ll see how all the sources we’ve […]

You’ve explored a broad array of sources for discovering the facts of your ancestors’ lives, and you’ve depicted those facts schematically on pedigree charts and family group sheets. In last month's meeting you saw how those bare-bone facts may be fleshed out into real-life events, which is what many of us are seeking in genealogy. A narrative genealogy or family history is a collection of biographies of people related by blood—in other words, an anthology of the life stories of kinfolk. In this lecture, we’ll see the process of constructing and narrating the biography of an ancestor. Come join us on Tuesday, July 20 at 7:00 – 8:00pm, to listen to a professional recording of a lecture by Professor John Philip Colletta, titled How to Write Biography.