Most of us who have worked in the business world are pretty familiar with self-assessments. They’re generally the first step in an annual performance review with your manager that directly impacts your compensation and position or title for the following year and longer. The fundamental concept is that reflection on the recent past and an honest consideration of your role in it leads to insight and growth that you would not achieve otherwise. But a written self-assessment for your manager’s eyes skews that concept somewhat. Self-assessment can and does slip into sales very easily when you know someone else’s assessment of your self-assessment will determine your immediate financial future. So it’s a pretty loaded process.

But what if we could strip away the impact on income and career, bringing self-assessment back to its purest and most fundamental form: a self-assessment for no one but ourselves? Is there a role for this kind of self-assessment in the world of genealogy? NGS member, Yvette Hoitink, CG, says “yes.” In a recent blog post, Hoitink discussed her development of a simple self-assessment tool that any of us can use at any time. She calls this tool “Six Levels of Ancestral Profiles,” a term that I suspect we’ll be hearing more often as more and more people begin to think about and use it.

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