Genealogy and Potatoes Redux: In Praise of American Ancestors’ New Family Heritage Experience

The facade of American Ancestors'
about-to-open 
Center for Family History,
Heritage & Culture 

I had the opportunity last week to visit Ryan Woods, the President of American Ancestors, at the organization's home office, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, on Newbury Street in Boston. Ryan and his team are scheduled to cut the ribbon on the new, very cool American Ancestors National Center for Family History, Heritage & Culture at 97 Newbury Street on April 24th. 

This spectacular new center is part of a multi-structure building complex named after American philanthropist and preservationist Thomas Bailey Hagen and Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The center will house the Brim-DeForest Library, R. Stanton Avery Special Collections, the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center, the Brue Family Learning Center, museum store, staff offices, and the Family Heritage Experience—an interactive museum experience that will introduce visitors to the joys and possibilities of family history. 

Acquiring the building next door to NEHGS’s long-time library was an opportunity that first presented itself in 2012, the final year of my term as Chair of the organization. The owner of John Lewis Jewelers paid a visit and led us on a tour. Now, after much planning, fundraising, and hard work, the center has been conceived and is (nearly) completed.

The new entrance to the Center is top left followed clockwise by the facade in 2011, showing the old John Lewis
Jewelers; below, our friends the Kyles admiring the design in 2011, and (bottom right) Ken Burns speaking at the first fundraiser
for the Center that same event and year, 2011.

Ryan was kind enough to take me for a tour and even allowed me to snap a few pictures. I don’t want to (and can’t possibly) give everything away, but the Family Heritage Experience is destined to be a top 10 Trip Advisor recommendation in Boston, something full of fun and interactive activities.

Arrive at the Center and place yourself on the map--where you belong!

Pick a disc, scan the barcode on the back, and get started on your genealogical journey.

The famous, or infamous Shattuck family painting. Like our current administration, if you don't like history, you just make
it disappear. That bush in the middle used to be, well...

As we were talking, Ryan reminded me of a brief talk I gave in 2008 when I was elected Chair. The talk, which I had forgotten, compared genealogy and the potato. Fortunately, I found it buried on this blog. So, I dusted it off and present it here.

I hope it will help you imagine the new Family Heritage Experience as an Idaho Russet potato fired at 117 feet per second through a hose into a finely sharpened grate, coming out the other side in a perfect French fry cut.

Two Kinds of Inspiration

We held a Board retreat for the New England Historic Genealogical Society this glorious fall week at the historic, (and some say) haunted Colonial Inn in Concord, MA.  During the retreat we launched discussion around updating our strategic plan, a discipline (despite all the noise about strategic plans being dead) that has been extraordinarily beneficial to the Society over the last two decades.

This is mostly because, also in the last decade, good ol' traditional genealogy has gone digital, global and Hollywood, been IPO'd and social-networked, and today has some of its largest players giving away content for free.  It's like Alex Haley's Roots on a six pack of Red Bull.  The upshot is that non-profit players have either reinvented their business models, or they've simply given up and gone away.  Unfortunately, there are more examples of the latter than the former.