BCG - Why I Became Certified — On Being Denied — Harold Henderson (transcript)

Hi, I'm Harold Henderson, board-certified genealogist from Laporte, Indiana, and I succeeded on my second attempt. I went through the whole process twice. Some of the mistakes—sometimes I think we learn better from bad examples than from good ones. So I'm here to offer a few bad examples for your consideration. One of them that I made was a mistake that I should have known that I was making. I received excellent advice, which was, and I quote, never submit the first one you do of anything closed quote. I did not follow this advice, and as a result, my supposed client report was a mess and didn't really matter in the end, whether the other parts of my portfolio were that good or not.

Another mistake related to that that I made that I did not realize I was making until afterwards was looking at all the seven requirements. I focused my attention on number seven, the kinship determination project, because that's sort of the thing that every genealogist wants to write about every ancestor they or their spouse or their second cousin, once removed, ever had. And so I put at least as much energy into that requirement as I did into the other six combined.  Well, but they're all equally important. The board has, over the years, streamlined the application process. You've got two documents for document work; you've got the client report; you've got a case study of conflicting evidence. You've got the kinship determination project. You can't afford to mess up any of them just because one is maybe going to be longer than the others, or you're more attached to it, doesn't mean you should slide it, either consciously or unconsciously. So those, those are two things not to do, and if I go on anymore with the things not to do, we'll be here all day.