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Online Course Review – Healing Conversations

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Angels and guides in the Amsterdamse Bos, June 2019. Photo taken by author.

Recently I began investigating the concept of Ancestral Trauma and Healing Ancestral Trauma in greater depth. I have spent almost eight years focused on healing my past issues from this life and others and healing my ancestral lineage. This focus on myself has allowed me to help military and family history clients with their journey as they discover things through research that were secrets or unspoken.

Family secrets, shame, guilt, negativity, abuse, trauma, fear, and other negative-based energies create a lot of blockages in our lives. They also create grief of which we may not always be aware until someone dies or we lose a job or have some other loss.

Healing Ancestral Trauma is also a topic most family and military history researchers avoid. It’s kind of a taboo subject like admitting you can hear/see/smell/touch the spirits of our ancestors or other dead. However, when we do not address our family’s trauma and baggage – we continue to carry it forward in our life and pass it to future generations.

Online Course – Healing Conversations

I discovered a healer/facilitator named Shauna Janz through the Ancestral Medicine practitioner listing. Her website discusses all of her services but what drew me in were her three classes on grief. She has a Teachable website for Sacred Grief where she teaches these courses.

Having been living in anticipated grief and other things since I met my now husband, especially the last two years if you have followed this website and my YouTube videos, I noticed many of my clients had similar issues as I did.

Shauna teaches a short course called Healing Conversations. I signed up for this yesterday and spent all morning reading the material, taking notes, exploring websites she recommended and now am ready to sit with the material and let it simmer.

This course talks about how we as a friend, therapist, facilitator, researcher, etc. can hold space for those journeying through grief. Shauna explains that in our modern world, most societies do not teach you how to grieve or even give you permission to grieve. It is more about “get over it,” or “men don’t cry” or “this will pass and time heals all wounds.”

When we hold our grief in because we have not been taught or given permission to express it – it can create more issues in our lives including disease. Isn’t it about time we learn some tools to move through grief for ourselves or to help our loved ones.

What does it mean to hold space for someone? It means we listen without judgment, we validate someone’s stories or feelings, we are a safe container for them to share their feelings and thoughts. Sometimes holding space just requires us to give a hug or be silent and hold someone’s hand. Other times it is us speaking up to validate what we heard and ask questions to which the griever may have no answers.

This class gave me exactly what I required today to learn some new tools in a quick way with easy to understand examples and narrative. Several handouts were provided and a resource guide was given at the end of the course. Now I’m all set to journal on what I read and consider how I can use these tools with my clients or friends and even myself.

Visit Sacred Grief to learn more about Shauna’s classes. I did register for Roots and Resiliency which begins soon and is only offered in the fall. I anticipate this will help me on more levels than I can even imagine.

Can I help you?

Are you ready to learn the bigger picture of your family member’s military service? Would you like support moving through the emotional and spiritual side of family and military research? We are a firm with not only hands-on document experience but also travel experience and can connect you with a guide or suggest places to stay and visit. I also facilitate clients and course participants through the mental and emotional parts of their family history.

We are taking new clients and can help you find the answers and tell a deeper story about your family member. Email us at info@wwiirwc.com to set up your free phone consultation today to discuss project options, fees, and time.

© 2019 Finding the Answers Journey & the WWII Research & Writing Center

Are You Wasting Your Money Using a Genealogy Record Retriever?

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Over the last few years I’ve written a lot about the best practices when doing WWI, WWII, Korean War or Vietnam War military research, especially when the records burned.

Over the last year I’ve gotten an overwhelming number of new clients who previously hired a genealogy record retriever who offers the cheapest prices for record retrieval and only offers One Month of Morning Reports for the same unit that is on your discharge paper. That’s the only option you can choose when you order this and put it in the shopping cart in that individual’s business. You get a whole month of reports whether your soldier was actually in that unit or not – for all the months he was overseas.

Rather than be quiet and let people continue to be taken advantage of – I provide education and the reasons why this is usually a waste of your time and money. I also offer a better approach to reconstructing service to get the answers you require. I’ve spent a decade studying this and wrote the only books available on how to research and have taught this in the U.S. and Europe. There are answers available to you even if the records burned. At the end of this article there are also other articles I’ve written about what these records mean, why they are so valuable and other things to consider when hiring a researcher. It is all personal choice who you work with, and now you have a few more pieces of information to make an educated decision. We don’t know what we don’t know.

Clients come to me with months worth of morning reports and say:

  • I have no idea what this means.
  • My father is only listed on one report which shows him coming into this unit after the war ended.
  • I just paid for 8 months of reports and my dad is only in a couple at the end of the war. It says he transferred into this unit right before he shipped home. What do all these other reports mean and why do I have them if he wasn’t in this unit?

Why Does This Approach Usually Waste Your Money and Provide Few Answers?

What this record retriever does not choose to acknowledge is the proper way to reconstruct military history. It is not as easy as taking the unit on the discharge paper and making that the whole story. 95% of the time it is not.

Out of all the Army and Army Air Forces projects I do whether records burned or not – the men and women were in multiple units. The unit on the discharge may be a discharge unit only. Meaning they were put in there at the end of their service for the purpose of discharge. I just finished a project for a man who was in 6 – yes 6 units throughout his entire service and the unit on his discharge paper was not the one he was in combat with.

Men and women were transferred within a Division or into a new unit due to a number of reasons which may include – personnel changes, reorganization, wounds and being taken out of your unit for a long period of time, transfers through units for discharge, the job they did (perhaps they drove a tank) is no longer needed so they are put somewhere else doing something else.

When you allow someone to blindly copy months of Morning Reports because the discharge paper gave you a unit and the researcher copies them all for the period your individual was overseas does not mean you actually get reconstructed service.

Case in point – this week a client came to me with six months of reports copied by this researcher. His dad was not in months 1 or 2 – he transferred in at month 3 from a different unit. The researcher does not bother to trace through those reports this soldier – so in essence this man wasted money on two months of records and he only knows about the time his dad was in this unit and not the others he was part of before or after this one.

How Do You Properly Reconstruct Service Using Morning Reports?

It’s quite simple actually. You start with the unit on the discharge paper and then you work backwards through the Morning Reports looking for every instance the soldier appears. So let’s say he was F Company 358th Infantry Regiment 90th Division at war’s end – which for this example was the death date on 11 January 1945. You start there and go backward. You realize in December 1944 the Morning Report shows this soldier as being transferred into this Company from a different unit.

At this point you stop looking at F Company records and get the microfilm for the unit he transferred from and locate him in those records. If one shows he was transferred – as this particular soldier’s does in February 1944 – from a Replacement Depot and a few weeks before that from the 126th Medium Maintenance Company where he spent over a year training – you keep pulling those different units.

This allows you to see the units he was in. My firm will also pull every time the unit changes station (location) – unless a client wants every single day of Morning Reports that we find for each unit he was part of. So we can not only reconstruct his service history but also every move he made with those units.

Can you see how blindly pulling months of reports does not really serve you in finding answers? Our approach takes a bit longer to do – maybe a few hours depending on the archivists getting us the films. It does not usually take days unless the unit is obscure and records are illegible, to get the answers required.

When you consider hiring a genealogy or military research professional – investigate how they are actually doing their job. Ask questions and if they are unwilling to provide answers on how they do the work they do or why they only do it that way – that is a red flag to seek out someone else. There are several researchers out there who operate in a more ethical and educated way to accomplish finding answers for our clients.

Additional Resources to Learn More

Are you ready to learn the bigger picture of your family member’s military service? We are taking new clients and can help you find the answers and tell a deeper story about your family member. Email us at info@wwiirwc.com to set up your free phone consultation today to discuss project options, fees, and time.

© 2019 World War II Research and Writing Center