Keely Vollmar was born and raised in Canton, Illinois, and has been teaching English at Canton High School since 2000. She became an English teacher because of her love for writing, but after 21 years of teaching she felt like she had missed out on something.

“I’ve always really loved history,” Vollmar said. “I really wanted to be able to teach history as well, and so I went out on the internet, started searching for programs and ASU was the one that I came across.”

Keely Vollmar, alumna of the ASU Online master’s degree in history.
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She enrolled in the online master’s in history program within the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Along with taking seminar courses in science and technology and the early American republic, Vollmar enrolled in a course about genealogy, the study of families and family history.

“We had the freedom to research whoever we wanted to within our family history, and so I picked a branch of my family tree, a great-grandmother that I didn’t know much about,”…