10 December 2014

OGS Student Essay Competitions

The following is an announcement from the Ontario Genealogical Society
"The Ontario Genealogical Society has established two essay competitions for students. Both require a paper to be written on a topic within family history. Both carry a prize of $500 and publication in Families. 
The Dr. Don Brearley Genealogical Essay Prize is open to secondary school students in grades 11 and 12 in any Ontario school. See the Guidelines for complete information and a flyer for posting. Submission deadline is April 1 of each year (or the following business day should this date fall on a weekend). 
The Mike Brede Genealogical Essay Prize is open to any full-time student in a university or community college who is either a resident of Ontario or attending an Ontario university or community college. See the Guidelines for complete information and a flyer for posting. Submission deadline is April 1 of each year (or the following business day should this date fall on a weekend).
For more information on either of these essay competitions, please contact the OGS Awards Committee at awards@ogs.on.ca."
It's fair to say that OGS has not been overwhelmed with entries to these competitions in past years.  If student competitions are aimed to increase interest in family history OGS would be wise to develop a competition more appealing to the social media generation?

5 comments:

Jane E MacNamara said...

Both these competitions require that the writer discuss at least three generations of a family, yet stipulate that no living people can be mentioned. So for these young people, whose parents, grandparents, and possibly great grandparents may be living, this seems particularly onerous. (I couldn't have identified three earier generations at that age!)

For high school and university students, "history" starts in the 1990s. And it ought to.

The rules also exclude any mention of the author, and thereby any discussion of how the actions of ancestors have impacted current generations.

Mike More said...

The OGS Awards Committee can be reached at awards@ogs.on.ca and I am sure would appreciate any help to improve the awards.

Mike More said...

It may be onerous to avoid discussing living people but that seems to be what our current privacy laws require.

JDR said...

I guess we have a Prime Minister but we can't mention his name! WDYTYA would be a pretty dull program if this was enforced. Better look at the law again.

Jane E MacNamara said...

I guess we need to decide if the point of the essay contests is to generate articles for Families, or to stimulate interest in family history in young people. I hope it is the latter, in which case we have to make the contests both relevant and appealing. If publishing in Families precludes writing about living people (and I'm not sure it needs to) then maybe that part if the "prize" should be dropped, or made optional.