"Or Related Field"

 

Though I didn't realize it at the time, I spent my college years majoring in "or related field." For those of us who chose unusual—read: not in demand—fields of study to pursue, that became our unintended consequence for the choices our eighteen-year-old selves made. Fortunately, there are indeed job opportunities out there for "or related field," or I would have starved to death long ago. It's the power to be flexible—or as some put it, the ability to reinvent ourselves—that allows us to take any steps forward.

There is a second benefit to such flexibility. For each time we step up and bring our talents to bear in those "unrelated" disciplines, we enrich the project as much as the project benefits us. The context in which we move forward now includes more than one point of view, more than one protocol, more than one regimen. The context now becomes enriched.

While the pursuit of genealogy is avocational for me, I have watched the field pass through seasons in which those bringing their "or related field" perspective have enriched the result for all of us. I recall when I first began researching my family's history in earnest. It seemed, in those early-Internet years of genealogy forums, that I was routinely making the acquaintance of other researchers who were, in their "other" life, doctors or lawyers or professors or librarians. If "genealogist" had a job description then, these would be the candidates eligible to apply on account of their qualifications in other fields.

Yet, when we think about it, to effectively make use of all genealogical tools available to us, that is what we need: the legal chops to digest the verbiage of courtroom procedures, the medical know-how to read those illegible diagnoses scrawled on our ancestors' death certificates—or the medical history smarts to translate old terminology into current-day disease nomenclature. We need the librarian's ability to sniff out just the right resource, no matter how rare, to reveal the specific information we're seeking. And we can certainly use the scientist's procedural rigor for formulating and then testing our research hypotheses.

Maybe the ideal genealogist would be the one person who harnesses each of these research superpowers—but it would be the rare person who has all these skills finely honed and always at the ready. Rather, it might be more helpful to see genealogy as a team process, where each of us brings our special perspective to the table to help each other attain our research goals more effectively. After all, each of us has a special "or related field" skill which can broaden the approach of our fellow researchers. We can enrich the process of working together to help each other jump over those ancestral brick walls.