… consider genealogy…
The Legal Genealogist has no idea where the whole GivingTuesday thing began.
Yes, even Wikipedia says it got its start in 2012 as “the brainchild of Henry Timms at the 92nd Street Y in New York” with a “co-founding organization,” the United Nations Foundation.1
And that’s the story on the About page of the website of the organization by that name.2
And that sounds good to me; I just haven’t verified it.
What sounds even better?
Doing something — almost anything — on this Giving Tuesday to give back to the genealogical community.
And yeah… I do have an idea… or two.
First, for the Americans among us, we can take this to the top, and add to the push at the National Genealogical Society, where a gift right now (and through the end of the year, even) will be matched (up to a total from all donors of $30,000). This year, the emphasis is on funding education and records preservation efforts.
And second, for all of us anywhere, consider donating to the DNA Reunion Project at the Center for Jewish History — an amazing initiative focused on unlocking mysteries and making crucial connections, “often linking Holocaust survivors to living relatives they did not know they had.” As its web page adds, that “can be a priceless gift for a population ravaged by genocide, and time is of the essence, as that population ages and dwindles.”
Whenever and wherever GivingTuesday began, it’s a great opportunity.
We can take a moment today from the commercial trappings of our ordinary lives… and give instead.
We can even think of it as giving ourselves a gift.
The gift of community and continued or renewed connection to family.
What could be better than that?
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “On GivingTuesday 2022…,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 29 Nov 2022).
SOURCES
- Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.com), “GivingTuesday,” rev. 29 Oct 2022. ↩
- See “About GivingTuesday,” GivingTuesday.org (https://www.givingtuesday.org/ : accessed 29 Nov 2022). ↩
Thank you! Thinking about giving back, I have been introduced to Societies in my classes online. I decided it is time to branch out of my comfort zone and sign up for a Genealogical Society (OCCGS – Orange County California Genealogical Society) I will try this Society. Hoping it can be a win/win. Is there any others that you would consider good to join?
Think about societies that research in areas where your ancestors lived. For example, I now live in Virginia, but am a member of societies in Texas, Oklahoma and elsewhere.
I agree with you that the greatest thing that we could do is to give to others this Christmas season. I enjoy reading your post and getting to know more about you.
Thank you for your wonderful ideas to give back! I especially liked your idea of the DNA Reunion Project at the Center for Jewish History. It really is a wonderful way to “give back” to people who lived through a horrible time. I am very interested in DNA testing, but there are so many tests available. Do you have any insights as to which DNA tests might be particularly useful for genealogy work?
All of the commercial DNA tests have potential to be useful for genealogy: it just depends on what you want to find out. The one generally regarded as most useful is the autosomal DNA test — the test for the kind of DNA we all inherit from both of our parents1 in a mix that changes, in a random pattern, from generation to generation. It’s really useful for finding cousins who share some portion of DNA with us with whom we can then share research efforts. It’s the kind of test you get at 23andMe, Ancestry, MyHeritage and, under the name Family Finder, at Family Tree DNA. Then there are tests aimed at answering the question “Am I descended from — or at least related to — that one man or that one woman?” For the first question, the answer can come from a YDNA test — the kind of DNA found in the male gender-determinative Y chromosome that only men have. It gets passed from a man only to his sons and from his sons only to his grandsons and from his grandsons only to his great grandsons, with few changes down the generations. (Women can find out about their paternal lines by testing a stand-in: a brother or uncle or male cousin.) For the second question, the answer can come from testing mitochondrial DNA — mtDNA — the kind of DNA we all have that gets passed from a mother to all of her children — male and female — but only her daughters can pass it on to her grandchildren. Those tests are only done at Family Tree DNA, are more expensive than autosomal testing, but are very powerful in answering that single line-of-descent question.