Thursday, January 22, 2009

Read about "The Great Nepotism Experiment"

Take a small group of people working on a project. Add a genealogist to the mix who asks "are you related to each other?" Shake well, share much, your results may vary, and surprise you!

They certainly did for three teams in the article The Great Nepotism Experiment by Ceil Wendt Jensen, Jana Sloan Broglin and Jana Lloyd published recently in Ancestry Magazine.

This article was fascinating on two levels - the resources used by the genealogists and the results found. One group had no connections at all, one group had only two connections, but the third group had several ancestral connections to each other.

The genealogists used the person's home sources and family stories, the person's family tree data, online resources and databases, and published books.

This is a great idea for a local business, service group or society to do as a team-building exercise. It's also a way that genealogy societies can attract and enthuse potential new members from the local community - for instance, have an "Ancestor Search" or "Ancestry Road Show" day at the library during Family History Month.

1 comment:

Kaisa Kyläkoski said...

How about if there are (recent) immigrants in the group? Wouldn't they feel left out? I guess whatever considerations are used in the school family tree lessons should be applied here as well.

(In my work team there are 3 native Finns and one Scot. Since he doesn't speak Finnish, I think he feels enough of an outsider without finding out that the rest of us are related.)