I completed my genealogy final on Saturday, which means I have a bit of a break until my fall classes start. Granted, the break is only a week, really. Remember how I said that I have a lot of on-campus meetings for my fall classes? On Saturday and Sunday, I have all-day meetings for LIBR 248: Beginning Cataloging and Classification. It’s not a required class, but my aunt has recommended that I take at least one cataloging class. I haven’t started looking at the course information yet. I can be quite detail-oriented (okay, detail-obsessed) at times, so hopefully that will come in handy for this course. At the end, I fully expect to be able to identify Dewey Decimal numbered drinks off the cuff. Or something.

Summer classes, had me a blast,
Summer classes, happened so fast…

(I’ll stop parodying Grease music now.)

Okay, sometimes (especially at the beginning of the semester) I think I’m crazy for taking classes over the Summer, but I had a lot of fun with them, especially the genealogy class. The amount of reading for it was pretty insane, though, with two chapters of the book a week (avg of 150 pages, maybe) plus other reading, and an assignment each week. And that was just the one class. I did learn more about formalizing my genealogy research, which is what I was hoping to learn in this class. I also learned a lot more about the crazy number of sources there are available for using in genealogy research.

One of the assignments for the class was to write a research report on an ancestor. I decided to research my father’s family, because I know a lot less about his side of the family than I do about mom’s. I was hoping to find out more about the Devine name and where that part of the family originated. Instead, I ended up learning a lot more about the Platte family - my paternal grandfather’s mother. I was able to trace them back to Wales, which is kind of neat. I’ve requested some birth certificates and other information from the UK in hopes of learning more. It’s exciting to take the time to do more research - in fact, to be required to do it, for class!

All that’s left of my summer classes is one assignment, a quiz, and a final exam. Then I have a couple weeks before my Fall classes begin. Unlike the Spring and Summer, in which none of my classes met in person (although my genealogy class met online once a week), I have a lot of in-person meetings for my Fall classes. I’ll be spending some Saturday mornings or afternoons in San Jose. Luckily, I know the way to San Jose.