The first exercise brings the trainee face to face with raw information recovered and recorded by previous interns. They begin by organizing existing material so that it can be applied to individual case histories. After ten hours of alphabetizing, looking for improperly filed material, and much encouragement, the trainee begins to appreciate the need for precision in recording and consistency in filing. The trainee is becoming an intern and begins to recover information from new historical resources - the central part of the basic training experience. Constant monitoring reveals readiness to move on to more complex and challenging sources.
Some interns process several sets of church, government, court, real property, and business records.
Others are not able to progress beyond the most simple collection procedures. It matters not, as a seemingly limitless supply of copies of all of those primary sources awaits processing. At that point, the most arduous and least glamorous part of the internship has passed. After fifty hours of simple consolidation and collection, each internship is assessed as intern and managers reach consensus on how the rest of the program will be spent. Staples of the second half menu are a family reconstitution, neighborhood mapping, constructing individual biographies, group biography, and another set of choices - which involves the most gifted and ambitious interns in developing the graphics archive, articulating the real property data base, and in preparing simple programming items such as maps, guides, and reading lists.