Bringing Your Family History to Life Through Social History

History informs genealogy. It is the means to determine “the meat on the bones,” the authentic context of the past lives that genealogists strive to reconstruct. Many genealogists experience that exciting connection when they find famous, well-documented events and individuals in their family lines. Still more genealogists hope to make such famous “finds” and are frustrated that they do not.  Yet the field of history most applicable to genealogy and vice versa is social history, ordinary people’s everyday lives, culturally predictable in their family and social group contexts.

Using social history, historical resources, with family data and primary sources, you can predict and explain ancestors’ life choices, work and social lives, migration patterns, politics and religion, marriage and child naming or raising customs, and even the most private aspects of life. Learning historians’ skills and resources, how best to find and approach them, opens a new world to the genealogist. Family history can seem more complete and fulfilling. Creating projects to preserve recollections, documents, and artifacts with historical methods makes their preservation in permanent public collections more likely. You will have “brought your family history to life.”

Members, use the link in the email you will receive on Monday, August 1, to register.  Member registration fee is $5.00.

Non-members, use this link beginning on Thursday, August 4, to register.  Non-member registration fee is $10.00. 

Katherine Scott Sturdevant

Speaker Katherine Scott Sturdevant is the senior Professor of History at Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs. She has the BA and MA in History from San Francisco State University and the PhD candidacy from UC Santa Barbara. Her two books are Bringing Your Family History to Life through Social History (Betterway Books, 2000) and Organizing and Preserving Your Heirloom Documents (Betterway, 2002). An entertaining speaker, she has presented for most of the national genealogical and historical organizations. She has offered many classes and workshops on her family history approach. Most recently (2021), she presented her methods as applied to African American genealogy through ASALH (Association for the Study of African American Life and History), co-editing that special issue of their magazine Black History Bulletin, and will also publish on the subject in the online scholarly journal, Genealogy.