Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Keep looking for new evidence

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Today, I was perusing Facebook and I saw a post from Crista Cowan, corporate genealogist at Ancestry® that stopped me in my tracks. I had to grab my notebook and write down this sentence from her post:

Certainty is the enemy of curiosity.

She said that sometimes genealogists can become so certain about a fact that they stop looking for new evidence. And if we don’t look for new evidence, we’ll never disprove the “facts” in our research.

I immediately started thinking about how that might apply to my research and how I could methodically check to see what new evidence I might want to seek.

A few approaches came to mind:

  • I could climb my tree, one person at a time. For each person I could look in the Events, Facts and Notes tabs in Reunion, looking at what’s there and what sources substantiate each fact. Perhaps I might set a goal of having at least three source citations for each fact.  I could identify missing data as well.
  • I could just pick a person and do a search on Ancestry and/or Family Search to see what documents come up. I actually searched on my father today and found a 1954 City Directory listing that I had previously found and created a source citation for. But I missed that it mentioned my newlywed mother’s occupation in 1954 (she was working as a secretary for her father’s company while my dad was in the Army). So I added that to my database.
  • I could go back to my progress chart and see what B/M/D and census documents (and other information) remain to be found for the people in my tree.
  • I could go back to my source documentation checklist and continue going through each source to make sure I have extracted all the evidence from each source document.

I think any of these approaches would work well and I don’t think I have to choose just one. For the moment, I think I might start by going through my tree and examining what facts I have on my direct-line ancestors, creating a list of the new evidence I’m going to seek. This feels like a great second-half-of-the-year project to me!

In her post, Crista recommended the book Think Again, by Adam Grant, whose subtitle is “The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know.” I’ve put a hold on both the Kindle and audio versions of that book at my library and I can’t to read it through the lens of genealogy research.

June 30 x 30 wrap-up

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Now that the June 30 x 30 challenge is in the rear view mirror, it’s time to report in. How did it go? Were you able to research or organize every day this month? And did you get in 15 hours?

I’ve definitely had better months. I saw the handwriting on the wall mid-month and relaxed my goal to a total of four hours for the last two weeks. I did manage to achieve that, I believe. I tried hard to do a little something every day, and I probably did some research ten out of the last 14 days. I did have a couple of long sessions, so I got in those four hours.

My current project is processing the documents I found in my father’s and aunt’s homes. I did the initial sort when the boxes arrived, so all I have to do now is go to the file containing the ten items I’d selected to act on and pick one or more to enter into my Reunion database. I think I’ve emptied and refilled the action file three times now, so I’ve plowed through at least 30 documents.

Having the challenge definitely helped me get more done than I otherwise would have in a crazy busy month. I’m glad I did it! I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to devote more time to research during the next 30 x 30 challenge, which will be in August or September. And I do plan to try to get some research done in July as well.

If you participated in this challenge (or even if you didn’t), please let us know in the comments how your research month was!

Summer posting schedule

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As you may have noticed, I try to post new content here twice a week. My typical posting schedule is Tuesdays and Fridays. (I try to post Mondays and Thursdays on my business’s organizing blog.)

But my summer is shaping up to be very busy with work and travel and I realized that in order to take the pressure off myself, I am going to adjust my schedule for July and August to one post per week. I’m not going to commit to the day, but I will do my level best to post once each week.

I just made that decision and already feel lighter and less burdened. I love writing these posts but sometimes it’s hard to be inspired when I’m so busy with other parts of my life.

Keep an eye out on Thursday or Friday this week for a 30 x 30 wrap-up post and then, starting next week, look for a new post every week. After Labor Day, I expect to get back to twice-weekly posting.

Photo by Valerian KOo on Unsplash

Quick Tip #36: Do it now!

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Here’s the next in my occasional series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) post every now and then on a small topic that pops into my head. This one helps keep my backlog lean.

Do it now!

It is so easy to let a backlog of documents to be processed pile up. If you’re researching online and you download a document, it’s very tempting to move on to the next document to download, rather than processing the one you just found. (I process documents by extracting the facts from a document, entering them into my database on Reunion and creating a source citation that is used for each fact.) Way too often, I just download willy nilly without processing and the result is a backlog of documents to be processed that sometimes weigh me down. If we don’t extract the data from the documents we find, they’re not benefiting us.

So here’s my advice, when you’re doing online research, I encourage you to build time into your research session to process the documents that you find in that session. Either do it right after downloading or process all documents found in that session at the end of the session. This way, you’ll keep your backlog to a minimum and potentially valuable documents won’t languish in your backlog.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash