The Lloyd DeWitt Bockstruck Scholarship Awardees for 2021

In 2020, the Dallas Genealogical Society established a scholarship in honor of long-time member Lloyd DeWitt Bockstruck who passed away in May 2018. The fund provides genealogical training for members of the library staff over a five year period. This year’s award allowed Sandy Dowling and Crystal Brooks to attend the 2020 Texas Institute of Genealogical Research (TIGR).

Sandy Dowling

I am a newcomer to both the world of libraries and to genealogical research (I have been here just under a year). Though I have always been fascinated by the stories my aunts and great aunts would recount about our lineage, it was not until starting my job at the Dallas Public Library’s Genealogy division that I began to use anything close to academic rigor. Once I had learned the ropes of doing more serious genealogical research, however, I began a deep dive into my family’s Irish lineage. You could say I “caught the bug”.

Learning about the research my colleagues were conducting, I did not content myself with doing merely one type of genealogical research. Customer service is my area of expertise and beyond a personal curiosity in genealogy, it is important to me to be of use to whosoever may need assistance when visiting our library. After all, we serve genealogists performing all kinds of research and not just Irish! I am grateful for having had the opportunity to attend TIGR with the support of DGS and the Bockstruck Scholarship.

I selected the African Americans in the South course in part because of this desire to gain a more varied skillset. In part, too, because of my admiration for the work of my colleague Ari Wilkins. She has a particularly expansive approach to genealogy that has been refreshing to a beginner like me who was getting a bit bogged down scrolling through Ancestry.com search results. At TIGR, I got to work alongside researchers of equal degrees of professionalism and engage in conversations with them. It made me feel like doing advanced genealogical research was within my reach. As a junior researcher and newcomer to library work more generally, I was particularly enchanted by the work of Tim Pinnick whose enthusiasm for the potential of public and private library collections expanded what I know libraries can be capable of.

What I took away from TIGR is a deep respect for the people who perform this research methodically and rigorously. I have developed much higher standards for what I consider proof when it comes to supporting my theories. Genealogy is as much a science as any other of the hard sciences, and so the same standards need apply. I am proud to be able to hold myself to those standards, and to be able to support researchers at DPL who bear similar expectations of professionalism.

Crystal Brooks

I have been with the Dallas Public Library almost seven years and working in the Genealogy & History Division for three years as the Genealogy Librarian.  Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 the opportunity to attend a genealogical conference was delayed. When the opportunity presented itself to go to TIGR I was excited and immediately began working on my application for the Lloyd DeWitt Bockstruck Scholarship.  

When I received the scholarship, I chose to take the “From Spanish Rule to Republic: Research in the Lone Star State” course with Kelvin L. Meyers and Colleen Robledo Greene.  I was eager to delve into Texas records and learn how to navigate through collections from the Spanish, Mexican, and Republic era Texas. I know Kelvin as he is always researching here at the Library since I first started and knew his insight into the Republic era would be eye opening.  Learning Spanish is a personal hobby of mine, so I was excited to learn from Colleen on how to use that to my benefit in Texas research.

Once the class started it was great to see familiar faces and to learn amongst colleagues I have grown to respect over the years.  Taking the same class as Judy Russell whom I had the pleasure of listening to speak at a DGS Fall Seminar was absolutely inspiring.  Colleen’s knowledge on navigating these early Spanish and Mexican records was overwhelming and so thorough.  Having the classes be recorded and available for us to go back and access was immensely helpful since they were all so dense with valuable information.  I was so challenged by the homework and learning how to navigate records written in Spanish that having the talks to rewatch is what really allowed me to learn all that I possibly could and succeed at the homework.  

I am incredibly grateful to my instructors during this course.  They shared so much of their knowledge with us in a mere week that went by so quickly.  I have already been able to use some of what I learned here with our patrons at the Dallas Library.  I look forward to attending the conference again in the future.