Genealogy and Family History: Trace Your People, Prove Your Lines
Signature Course No. 500 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
No experience needed — your coach starts where you are.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Genealogy and Family History: Trace Your People, Prove Your Lines course, in the Personal Effectiveness & Well-Being category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
Most family history fails for lack of proof, not lack of records. A name is copied from someone else's tree because the name and the town match. A census entry is attached to the wrong household because the age is close enough. A story told at a kitchen table hardens, over two retellings, into a fact no record ever stated. This course teaches you to answer the only question that matters — how do you know? — link by link.
It starts with yourself. You start with the one person whose identity, parents, and place you can establish without argument, state one specific research question, and prove each generation backwards before you take the next — your own house emptied of evidence first, testimony taken as testimony, and every conclusion labeled at exactly the strength its evidence supports: proved, probable, possible, or unproved.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — The Method and the Core Records — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with A Proved Generation File; then, Module 2 — Wider Records, Harder Problems, and the Written History — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Family-History Dossier.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a proved generation file for one link in the running Hartley line: the research log and search plan, the inventoried home and testimony evidence, the cited record set, the identity analysis that excludes the same-name alternative, and the written proof with its honest remainder; and a complete family-history dossier: a multi-generation proof set, one full written proof argument, a DNA plan or a reasoned refusal, and a preservation and sharing plan.
The honesty standard is part of the course. Method and judgment are promised; no lineage outcome is promised. Some lines prove cleanly, and some end, honestly, at a record that does not survive — a course that promised you an ancestor would be selling something it cannot deliver. And living people are not research material to publish: consent is a research skill here, asked before you record, share, or publish, and a DNA surprise is a human event before it is a research finding.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
Genealogy and Family History: Trace Your People, Prove Your Lines is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning delivers.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with your own first question. Write the research question you most want to answer, and say whether it names one person, one relationship, and a place and period; name the earliest ancestor you currently "know" and the record that connects that person to the generation below; and describe your notes honestly — would they tell you exactly what you already searched and found nothing in? Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — A Proved Generation File for Module 1 and The Family-History Dossier for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Prove it, or label it unproved — in that order, every time. Almost every move in this course returns to the same discipline: a conclusion is stated at exactly the strength its evidence supports, and the label travels with the claim wherever the claim is copied. An honestly labeled unproved line is good work; an unlabeled guess is contamination for everyone who copies it after you.
Module 1 builds the method and the core records. Start with yourself and work backwards; empty your own house of evidence before you pay anyone for theirs; take oral history as testimony to test, not fact to copy; read vital records for what each was created to prove and who informed it; read census pages whole, across the page and across the years; analyze every piece of evidence in the field's standard terms; cite so another researcher can retrace you; prove identity against the same-name trap; and write your first proof of a single parent-child link.
Module 2 widens the record base and hardens the judgment. Land, probate, and court records; military and pension files; immigration and naturalization papers; newspapers, directories, and local histories — each read for its own weight and limits. DNA enters as one evidence stream among several, fenced by ethical duties stated plainly. Then the hard crafts: a brick wall worked honestly with the cluster method, conflicting evidence resolved in a written proof argument, and the whole body of work organized, preserved, and shared so it survives you and respects the living.
And it holds its boundary throughout. This is a consumer course, written for one reader tracing their own family — not a professional credential course, and not presented as preparation for any credential. It teaches the researcher's discipline the field's published standards describe, on United States records in the most detail, and states the method so it travels to other record systems — whose rules you will verify locally, as the course teaches.
What you will learn
- Work from the known to the unknown: state a research question, prove one generation before attempting the next, and keep a research log that shows your reasoning
- Inventory and protect a home archive, record the provenance of every item, and take oral history with consent, as testimony to be tested against records
- Read vital records and census records for what they can actually carry — who created each record, who informed it, and what its limits are
- Analyze evidence in the field's standard terms — source, information, and evidence classes — and label every conclusion with the class of evidence it rests on
- Write citations at the moment of copying that let another researcher find the same record and check your reading of it
- Prove identity across records, disprove a namesake as carefully as you prove an ancestor, and write a parent-child proof at the strength the evidence supports
- Use land, probate, court, military, immigration, newspaper, and directory records as relationship evidence, each read for its own weight and limits
- Use DNA as one evidence stream among several, work brick walls by cluster and hypothesis, resolve conflicts in a written proof argument, and preserve and share the finished history responsibly
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Genealogy and Family History: Trace Your People, Prove Your Lines, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: A Proved Generation File and The Family-History Dossier
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for people tracing their own families
Beginning family historians — you have names, a few dates, perhaps a shoebox of photographs, and no method yet for telling a proved line from a copied one; and long-time hobbyists with an inherited tree — someone handed you years of work, or you built it quickly in an online tree, and you now want to know which parts of it you can actually stand behind.
Family record-keepers — the person relatives call when a document surfaces, who wants to interview elders well, preserve originals properly, and hand down something checkable.
Researchers facing a surprise or a wall — a DNA result that does not fit the story, a line that stops dead in 1880, two men of the same name in one county — who need a disciplined way forward rather than a hopeful guess. This course assumes you can read carefully, write a clear paragraph, and keep an honest log; it assumes no prior research experience and no subscription to any platform.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with the Known-to-Unknown Rule
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
Before you enroll
What is a Socratic coaching session?
A conversation, not a video. Your coach asks a question; you answer — out loud by voice, or by typing — and the coach responds to what you said: naming the misconception it hears, affirming what you got right, and asking the next question. You advance only when you have mastered each concept, so a finished course means the learning held.
How long does it take — and how long do I have?
About 30 minutes per concept. Learn in sittings of any length; your progress is saved as you go. You have a full year from purchase to finish, and you can revisit and retake within that year.
What does the certificate verify?
That you completed every concept and both capstones of this course. Anyone can confirm a Cognosco certificate online — enter its certificate ID on our verification page.
What if it isn't for me — what are the refunds?
If you have not started, cancel for a full refund within seven days of purchase. Once you have started, there is no cash refund — stop before finishing and we credit the full amount you paid toward any other course in the library (credit valid one year from your original purchase). Once you complete the course, no refund or credit applies.
More Signature Courses are coming
Genealogy and Family History: Trace Your People, Prove Your Lines is Signature Course No. 500. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.