The Texarkana Gazette has an article by John Fooks, covering a very interesting teacher, Texarkana College history teacher Dr. Beverly Rowe. She asked her students to research the history of the area and its buildings, and along the way, taught them how to do a little genealogy research.
Excerpts from the article:
When Texarkana College history teacher Dr. Beverly Rowe began a special history class project during the 2003 fall semester, her students could not understand why they were being asked to do a detailed research of the boring old buildings in downtown Texarkana.
But they later would understand. Once they were blind, but now they could see, Rowe said of the students and the research project…….
The students researched the city directories to create the historic “skeletons†and family trees of each lot. They were required to research at least 10 city directories to create each skeleton. They were also encouraged to research photographs and documentation from the downtown library and museum, or look at books previously published, such as John Leet’s pictorial history of Texarkana and the two pictorial books the Texarkana Gazette has published.
They also learned that they could research U.S. Census information for any town, street or person. They could glean personal information on just about anybody on Ancestry.com, a major Internet site for family genealogy research. There are also search engines such as rootsweb.com and genwood.com.