Jean Atkinson Andrews, CG
Jean Atkinson Andrews may be familiar as a regional director on the National Genealogical Society (NGS) board and as its outgoing treasurer. She is South Carolina’s second BCG associate. She confesses, though, to having (paraphrasing Garrison Keillor) “a certain smug satisfaction in being a Midwesterner,” raised in the soybean country of central Illinois.
Jean and her husband retired from Ohio to South Carolina eight years ago. Growing up in the North, she knew the Civil War from the Union perspective. Recently she has begun working with Redcliffe, a South Carolina state historic plantation, to trace descendants of the African American slaves who worked and lived there. The project has given Jean a perspective from the “other” side and an appreciation for the passion African Americans and non-slaveholder whites brought to defending their way of life.
Describing herself as “rather bookish,” Jean tells of a teenage summer spent reading the local newspaper obituaries at her public library. In just one month she traced her Atkinson roots back to England. She now dismisses that effort with a laugh and knows her roots extend from Illinois back to Indiana, and perhaps to Maryland via Kentucky.
Jean’s training in accounting, an MBA in finance, and a career in the automotive industry prepared her to track, analyze, and justify large volumes of data. On retirement she put those skill to work researching her husband’s difficult and interesting Ohio line.
About four years ago Jean began seriously pursuing certification, which has changed her work “exponentially” for the better. Besides the “usual suspects,” Elizabeth Shown Mills and Tom Jones, Jean appreciates “timely prodding” toward certification from her BCG-associate-mentors Shirley Langdon Wilcox, Barbara Vines Little, and Nancy Peters. Jean would make the NGS Quarterly articles by “outstanding South Carolina genealogist GeLee Corley Hendrix required reading for anyone interested in Palmetto state research.”
Jean especially values the rubrics in preparing her successful portfolio. She explains, “After finishing each segment of the portfolio, I would critique it against the appropriate rubric and each of the relevant standards. Once I felt I had done my best work, I put it aside and did not return to it.” She advises prospective applicants, “Focus on producing your best work and not on being perfect.”
Jean loves writing and has published in the NGS Magazine and the Ohio Genealogy News. She has submitted her first scholarly article for publication in a leading genealogical journal. It treats a brick wall solved with, among other things, the serendipitous discovery of scraps of receipts in an Ohio probate file.
Jean can be reached at and through the BCG website. Welcome, Jean!
CG or Certified Genealogist is a service mark of the Board for Certification of Genealogists, used under license by Board-certified genealogists after periodic competency evaluation, and the board name is registered in the US Patent & Trademark Office.