What a week! BEYOND Digging Deeper hit the ground running at 2025 GRIP Genealogy Institute

Last week’s GRIP Genealogy Institute was a blast. I’m a bit caught up on sleep and lots of housework.I have been a course coordinator with GRIP since 2012. In 2024, I developed a companion course to the one that I had coordinated since 2012. It’s not a replacement course, but they complement each other. 2025 marks the third year that GRIP has been under the auspices of the National Genealogical Society

Designing a new genealogy institute is not for the faint of heart. The hours it takes from concept to the week of education would scare many people. Me? Yes, a bit, but the reward makes it worthwhile.

A course coordinator does not do the work alone. In the case of this year’s new GRIP Genealogy Institute course “BEYOND Digging Deeper: Sources, Methods, and Practices,” that work was far from being all mine. Eighteen months of discussion on topics, descriptions, syllabus content and compilation, and then pulling together the presentation slides. Seven instructors put in that time to assure the best education possible. Contracts were discussed and the order in which each presentation should be done took time. Messages were sent by email, texting, Facebook messenger, and a few phone calls. We did it!! The new course BEYOND Digging Deeper dug deep and found many levels of satisfaction.

These instructors excelled, as I knew they would. Amy E. K. Arner, CG; Cyndi Ingle; Teresa S. McMillin, CG; Debbie Mieszala, CG; Kimberly T. Powell, AG; and Cari Taplin, CG, deserve much gratitude for their dedication to this new course. Thank you, a million times and more.

Kristi Sexton and Gena Philibert-Ortega, the Co-managers of GRIP Genealogy Institute need to be thanked and appreciated for all they do year-round. Paula Williams is the GRIP Virtual Event Coordinator and our head Tech person. She is assisted by a GRIP Guide for each course. All of us involved with the BEYOND Digging Deeper course appreciate the work of Laurie Desmarais as our GRIP Guide this past week. Then there are other NGS staff members and volunteers who helped to make sure 2025 GRIP Genealogy Institute virtual week did well. More gratitude. My thanks to Cari Taplin for allowing me to present three sessions in another course last week about Great Lakes region research.

This paragraph is bragging about our students this past week. Involved, present, thinking, participating, friendly, smiling, responsive, contributing, and I could say much more. I will end this bragging by saying thank you to all of them and being the inaugural students in this course.Thank you all.

Paula

aka Paula Stuart-Warren, CG, FUGA, FMGS

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