June 13-18, 2010

Main Page
Courses

Communication
Evening Sessions
Faculty
Faculty Forms
Frequently Asked Questions
Future Institutes
History
Housing / Dining
Jean Thomason Scholarship
Mission
Policies & Deadlines
Registration
Sunday Orientation
Tuition
Visiting Samford

Ph.D.
CG
CGL
FASG

Coordinator: Course 5
Lecturer: Courses 4, 5


Thomas W. Jones, Ph.D., CG, CGL, is NGS Quarterly editor, Board for Certification of Genealogists trustee and past president, former Association of Professional Genealogists trustee, 2004 recipient of APG’s Grahame T. Smallwood Jr. Award of Merit, and 1997 and 2002 winner of the National Genealogical Society Award for Excellence for articles in the NGS Quarterly. He has been certified since 1994. A professor of education at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., he is a genealogical educator who speaks and writes frequently on genealogical evidence, proof, and problem solving. Personal and professional genealogical research since 1964 has taken Jones to records of all states east of the Mississippi plus Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. His experience includes on-site research in courthouses, libraries, and archives in most of those states, the Family History Library, and other major genealogical repositories. He also has conducted research in records of France, Germany, and Ireland, and on-site research in Ireland. His specialties, however, are Georgia, Ireland, and Virginia.

Jones's first scholarly genealogical essay, published in the NGS Quarterly in 1990, addressed the complexities of discovering and documenting an unrecorded surname change and applying the discovery to reconstruct relationships in an early American family. Altogether Jones has contributed ten articles to NGSQ, six of which have dealt with analyzing difficult genealogical problems and developing sound conclusions. His 1997 NGSQ Award for Excellence recognized an essay explaining how name variations, a common surname, misinformation in a death certificate, census inconsistencies, and an altered record were overcome to connect a Florida family to its Virginia forebears. The 2002 award was for an article demonstrating and explaining how to piece together indirect evidence to reconstruct a lineage in eighteenth-century Ireland.