Welcome to the Heart of Prairie Roots Genealogy
Hello! My name is Janelle Asselin, and I have spent nearly my entire adult life researching my own family history while I worked as an editor. As my passion and dedication to genealogy has grown, it led me to decide to pursue genealogy more deeply. I love the written word and always will—but diving into research to help history come alive for myself or others is so fulfilling and enjoyable. Thankfully, it’s important that good genealogists are also good writers, editors, and critical thinkers… all skills I’ve been developing in my editorial career. I plan to use this space to write about my personal research, subjects and areas of genealogy I’m interested in, and genealogy tips and tricks. I love how supportive the genealogy community is, and I want to honor that with my own writing.
So how did I get here?
We have to go back to a little girl in Nebraska who was obsessed with history. I grew up in an old house on an acreage with my parents, two siblings who were quite a bit older, and later a younger sister who was quite a bit younger. I spent a lot of time with books, particularly those about history, reading quietly in a corner while (as my family now knows) also eavesdropping on whatever latest family gossip the older members of the family were talking about.
Janelle, age 10
A few of my most treasured memories from childhood are: visiting Laura Ingalls Wilder’s homesites in De Smet, South Dakota; watching family home videos over and over again; the moment my mom put a paperback of Little Women in my hands in a bookstore; running around in the land and woods behind my house in full 19th century dress; looking through my parents’ large collection of photos of our family; choosing Pleasant Company (now American Girl)’s Meet Kirsten book at a Scholastic Book Fair; and sharing my beloved doll with my grandmother only for her to produce her childhood doll from around 1920 to tell me about.
As I grew up, my love of books and history grew with me. I was very academically-inclined and did well in school. Although journalism interested me and I initially went to college with a plan to pursue a career in journalism, a combination of my love for books and the growing decline of print journalism made an English degree a better choice. Life threw me some curveballs as I was working through my college education, but I eventually graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language and Literature before also obtaining a Masters of Science in Publishing.
Janelle at her Masters of Science graduation, 2011
In February 2010, I was going through a time of great change in my life. I was in my mid-20s; I was living in Brooklyn, New York, in my first solo apartment; I’d just started my graduate program; and I’d just gone through a divorce. I was less than three years into my career as an editor, which I loved, but I felt a little adrift. Suddenly, I was going home to only my two cats at the end of the work day, and it felt as if there were a lot more hours in my day.
And then Ancestry dot com reeled me in!
Like many people at this time, I was watching the American version of Who Do You Think You Are? and it led me to sign up for an account at Ancestry. The first emails I have about genealogy are from March 2010, as I shared census findings with my mom for her parents and grandparents.
In those early days of delving into my family history, I didn’t understand the basics of good genealogy research. Somehow, despite being in the midst of a degree where I did a great deal of research for my thesis, I never connected the dots between academic research and genealogical research. So instead, I did what many newbie family historians do: I clicked on the hints on Ancestry, and accepted most of them at face value. I rarely stepped outside that one website, and I accepted the suggestions of other people’s trees without verifying their information.
Now, if this is where you are in your genealogy journey now, please know that it’s okay—any mistakes made at this stage can be corrected. I’ll even be writing a bit here to help educate and inspire you on how to improve your research and correct mistakes.
In more recent years, however, I wanted to ensure my genealogical research was as solid as it could be, and I began exploring genealogy education. Did you know that the genealogy community offers endless numbers of interesting webinars, institutes, courses, and more to teach you everything from the very basics up to the most unique, niche areas of research? The best source for discovering these offerings is ConferenceKeeper.org, but there are many other places that list or provide educational options.
I opted to take the National Genealogical Society’s “Advanced Skills in Genealogy” course, which I found immensely useful. It’s a robust program, self-led but with mentor reviews of assignment. I learned a great deal, but I am happy now to have shifted gears from intensive education (while working full time!) back to the research and storytelling I so enjoy.
For me, genealogy ultimately is about people and our connections to one another. And while a large part of exploring those connections is the research and analysis necessary to gain further understanding of events in the past, another significant part is telling those stories. Whether that’s just making sure you have built your family tree and documented the events in people’s lives or putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and writing a narrative account, you are telling the stories of those who came before.
I believe that it is not just those who had great wealth, wrote history books, held positions of power, or put their name to something who deserve to be remembered and have their stories told. I know that I wish to be remembered long after I’m gone, as I’m sure most of us do. I also believe that while we all choose who we would like to be in this world, that a great deal of what we start with comes from those who came before. I deeply enjoy building the story of a family, the individuals, the events, the connections to others and to historical happenings, and putting it all together for the people of today. That has long been true for my research into my own family, but is also true of research I do for others.
