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Fertile Ground: Improving Your Family History Center to Enable Effective Research
When I was called as Director of our stake Family History Center in August 1997, I walked into a newly-renovated center that nobody in the stake knew how to run. Since an official training manual for directors did not exist then, I had to figure out for myself how to get supplies, computers, software, forms, light bulbs, electrical outlets, phone jacks, keys, purchasing accounts, personnel, and pencils. What a shame, I thought. If only there were a manual, I could forget about learning how to get more light bulbs, and instead focus on helping patrons learn about their ancestors. Despite those first-year trials, our Family History Center improved rapidly in hardware, software, budget, training, and personnel. As the center's ability to sustain effective research increased, so increased the family history activity of our stake members. Realizing that many other Family History Center directors were having to learn by trial and error as I did, I decided to share my findings on the Internet. I hope that Fertile Ground will help you improve your Family History Center so that it can sustain effective genealogy research. May you enjoy this guide and the wonderful work it helps you do! Printing Permission & Instructions Please feel free to print out Fertile Ground for use at home or at a Family History Center -- it was made to be shared. Only two restrictions apply to the printing and copying of Fertile Ground: First, don't sell it or incorporate it into a publication meant for getting gain. Second, please include the URL (Internet address) on any printouts or copies. This way, others will be able to find the lessons here as they are updated. To print a lesson:
Unfortunately, Web pages don't print consistently. When you print a Web page, you have little control over page breaks, table widths, and many other elements you can control in a word processor. In order to improve the printing of Fertile Ground, I've begun to post charts and certain lessons using Adobe Acrobat. The Acrobat reader, which is free at www.adobe.com, allows you to print these documents exactly as they appear in a word processor. Eventually, I'll create Acrobat versions of all this guide's lessons and compile them into a book which you can download here. This book will contain a table of contents, an index, and active Internet links. Posting Schedule Although I like to post one lesson per month, long work weeks and Sundays working on my callings have taught me to quit making promises about deadlines. This guide's lessons, then, will be posted as they are completed. Sections are arranged in the order in which they should be tackled. For instance, requesting a staff is tough if you have not first rallied the support of stake leaders. To grow your FHC, build each of these tasks upon the last one. Course Outline for Fertile Ground: Improving Your Family History Center to Enable Effective Research
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