WAGS (Williamsburg Area Genealogy Society)

Later this afternoon, I’ll be attending the monthly meeting of the Williamsburg Area Genealogy Society.  This group came into existence in the spring of 2019 as a follow-on to an Osher Class I taught, called “Creative Genealogy.”

I had been doing serious genealogy research for about five years at that point, and I thought I had some insights to offer.  This was a three-session course (two hours per session).  In the description of the course, I said that by using the word “Creative” in the title of the course, I didn’t mean you should just make stuff up to make your family sound more interesting.  Rather, I meant that through creative approaches to your genealogy work you could find more useful information and have more fun while you were doing it.

Here's how I organized the course:

• Class One:  Creative Research. 

  o   What sources are out there?

  o   How can you use online and physical sources of information more productively.?

• Class Two:  Creative Organizing

  o   What do you do with the information you find?

  o   How can you organize information so you can find it later?

• Class Three:  Telling Your Story in Creative Ways

  o   How can you convey your findings to the wider world? What creative ideas — writing, scrapbooking, home decor — can you employ?

  o   How can you make sure that your research outlives you?

While we were making our way through these sessions, we set up a regular exchange among the class members to share ideas and insights.  At the end of the third class, Debbie raised her hand and said, “Well, this is too much fun to stop now.  How about we keep this going?”  So we did.  None of us had family members or “other” friends who wanted to hear us natter on about our distant ancestors, but among ourselves we can natter on as much as we want.  Debbie became our de facto leader, and she maintains our website, writes our newsletter, and organizes our meetings.  One of our agenda items for this afternoon’s meeting is to identify some folks who will be willing to take on some of these functions.

In the succeeding three years, our group has grown to about 40 members; we usually have 25 or so at each of our monthly meetings.  We soon outgrew meeting in people’s houses, so we made a few field trips – to several local genealogy libraries and to the Library of Virginia in Richmond.  In the fall of 2021, we affiliated with the Osher Institute as a “Shared Interest Group,” which benefitted us in two ways:  we were able to publicize our group in the Osher Catalog, and Osher agreed to provide us with meeting space.  Here’s our website if you want to take a look:  https://genealogy.edublogs.org/

Some of our members are very experienced genealogists, but some are relative newbies to the hobby.  Some of our members value their membership in various lineage societies, like the DAR or Mayflower Society, but others are not particularly interested in this.  Several of our members are dealing with the unknowns associated with adoption, either their own adoption or a situation in their families.  Some of our members have ancestors who all came to America around 1900; other have ancestors who arrived in the 17th century.

Since we’ve begun to meet in the Osher classroom space, we started going out to dinner as a group after our meetings.  The Osher building is in a part of Williamsburg called “New Town,” and there are a lot of nearby restaurants for us to select from.  So far, 12 of our members have said they want to go out to dinner tonight.