Learning Styles in Genealogy

One of my genealogy friends and fellow blogger Midge Frazel, recently wrote a blog post about Project Based Genealogy. I was fascinated by Midge's explanations of Project based versus Problem based and realized that the way I approach my genealogy is mostly Project based.

One of her key points was that genealogists often do not stop to analyze what they've found. Anyone who reads this blog or my AskOliveTreeGenealogy blog knows that I am constantly advising readers to study, think about and analyze the documents and facts they find when researching.

Midge goes on to talk about random abstract learning styles versus concrete sequential. Try as  I might, I'm definitely in the first group of random abstract! I can manage to stick to a methodical research plan in short bursts but am soon back to having huge leaps of ideas and hunches and off I go to investigate. Creative problem solving is definitely huge for me.

And true to form as I read Midge's post with great interest, I got side-tracked by a link she provided to an earlier blog post which also had a link to a site where you can take a quiz to find out what your learning style is.  I was hooked and off I went.  (Yes I did return to Midge's article and read it thoroughly. I urge everyone to have a good read of it)

So what learning style am I?  Intrapersonal. It's also called the Solitary Learning style. Yep that's me. I don't like any noise or any distractions and I hate interruptions. I'm also determined to figure things out on my own with no help from anyone else. Sometimes that's good and sometimes that's bad!

My family think I'm impulsive because I will, in their minds, suddenly make a decision about something I've not even discussed with them. But what they don't realize is that I've been researching the problem quietly, for weeks or months - sometimes for years, before I make my decision. So what comes as a sudden surprise to them is not sudden or impulsive at all. It's the result of a very long deliberation, of thinking over what I've found about the problem - the pros and cons.

I approach my genealogy research the same way. There is no right or wrong to how we conduct our genealogy but I like learning new methods and trying them out, seeing if I can adapt to them or adapt them to my style.

I should add that the Linguistic Style also ranked very high on my overall score on the quiz (75%) but Intrapersonal topped them with a whopping 94%. 

What about you? Take the quiz. Read Midge's blog post. Then come back and let me know in a comment on this post, what you think and what your learning style is.