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Back to School
Claire Bradley
September 03, 2024
Some of you may have seen this on my social media but I am excited to share my new business logo.
September for me always signals the return to education. In Ireland, it is when children and college students go back for another year. I am running my bi-annual course in Irish family history at Malahide Community School in north county Dublin. There are limited places available & you can get all the details here. This course is now in its 14th year & I regularly revise the course content.
If you’re not able to take this class, you can also learn with me via the International Institute of Genealogical Studies where I am both Irish Studies & DNA Studies director. These courses can be taken at your own pace - very useful if you have limited time or a fixed work schedule. The Irish certificate course has been fully revised over the past 18 months and a really useful Latin for Genealogists course is launching in September. IIGS certificate courses provide an accreditation (USA) called a Professional Learning Certificate.
I’ll also be giving some individual lectures to different organisations throughout the colder months & will put up details of those in due course. A reminder that you can now book for BIFHSGC’s conference in October, where there is a great program of speakers including me!
As well as giving lectures & classes, I also spend a lot of time learning myself. Genetic genealogy, in particular, is such a fast-paced new technology that there are new methods and ideas all the time. I try to watch at least one talk every week. To stay up to date, here are a few places I keep an eye on to learn. Most are not aimed at professionals & many will have levels attached so you can see if it’s something you’re ready for. None of these are affiliate links. I’m not including here the summer school/institute model such as GRIP or SLIG which generally require a much bigger time and money commitment.
Rootstech has a very large bank of previous lectures available for free (just register a Familysearch account).
Legacy FamilyTree Webinars has a huge bank of DNA lectures as well as a smaller set of Irish research classes. Some talks are free for a certain period. Everything is recorded so once you’re a member, you can watch back anything. I just watched Donna Rutherford’s The Power of Siblings. I’m now comparing matches for my parents & their siblings as a result.
The Society of Genealogists (based in the UK) does monthly webinars on a variety of topics. If you’re a Gold member, you can watch back many old ones too. They offer the Gold membership at a monthly level too, so you could just get it for a month & plan to spend time really upskilling.
Leah LaPerle Larkin (aka The DNA Geek) runs regular webinars on how to use modelling tools like Banyan DNA and WATO (on DNAPainter.com) as well as more complex DNA problems like endogamy.
YourDNAGuide (Diahan Southard) specialises in mini-courses on a variety of DNA topics. All the courses are done in short segment videos with exercises. They can be expensive but are very good & are designed to solve particular problems.
Pharos Tutors offer short, reasonably-priced courses on many topics. 5 years ago, I took their Professional Genealogist, Become one, Become a Better one course when I was still deciding if I could make my passion my full-time work. I’ve recommended it to many in the same position, and from it sprung the Pro-Am Genie network, which I co-founded with Dr Sophie Kay & Phil Isherwood. We’re proud to have a group of more than 70 people across several countries now. Membership is open to anyone who takes the Pharos course, past or present. If you have already taken this course, drop me a message to get added to our private group.
When it comes to Irish research, I encourage you to join relevant family history societies who usually post lectures for members online. Here’s a selection of organisations of which I’m a member.
Subscribing to free newsletters from local or national repositories will keep you updated on anything they may be running, usually in-person. We just had the annual (erroneously named much longer than a week) Heritage Week in Ireland and I’ve attended some great lectures, all free. If you’re aware of another good course or found an online lecture that was great, please let me know in the comments. Happy learning!