Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Google is your friend

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Google logoI have a tendency to go straight to Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org or Fold3.com when I start to research a family member. But today, I went to Google and did a search the maiden name of one of my great grandmothers. Wow, I’m glad I did!

I found a link, on Scribd.com to a published family history of three lines of my family, one of which is headed by that great grandmother’s grandfather. The history was written in 1967 and it’s not heavily sourced. But it provide information that I had never heard before (like details of my great grandfather’s service in the Philippine Insurrection) and am itching to get to work verifying it.

Speaking of Google, I recently read an article in Discover Your Roots, a special magazine from Family Tree, called Your Guide to Google, by Allison Stacy. It offered ways to use Google, including search syntaxes, that I hadn’t been aware of. I consider myself quite a good Googler, but I’m anxious to learn new ways to use it in my family history research. I’ll report any Google a ha moments here!

Census aid

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Sometimes it’s the little things that can make a big difference.

I created a little two-column chart that I put up on my bulletin board. In the left-hand column is a census year for each of the censuses from 1790 to 1940. In the right-hand column is the corresponding ordinal number. So 1940 is Sixteenth, 1930 is Thirteenth and so forth.

If you’ve looked at a U.S. census, you know that the year of the census is in tiny letters but which census it is (Fifteenth, Fourtheenth, etc.) is in big letters. I can’t tell you how much squinting this little chart has prevented.

I love it when I can do one little thing to make my life easier.

In case you’re interested in printing one out for yourself, I attach a link here to a pdf of my chart: census ordinal numbers. I hope you find it helpful!

Those darn nicknames

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My great great grandmother's death certificate

My GGGM’s death certificate

When you’re looking at names on a census record, or a family tree someone else has  compiled, it’s so easy to get fixated on the person’s formal name. But, in fact, even on formal documents, a nickname might be used. And if you’re using an index, that can make finding that person difficult.

Case in point: I was looking for the death certificate of my maternal grandfather’s mother. I understood her name to be Antoinette Brown. (I haven’t thoroughly researched her…I saw her name on her husband’s death certificate and thought I’d see if I can find hers, since Missouri makes it so easy.)

I figured it was a good guess that she died in the same county in which they lived and in which he died and I searched on “Antoinette Brown,” “Antonia Brown” and “A Brown.” I got nothing. So I searched county wide for all deaths of Browns between 1910 and 1961 (the date range for which images of the death certificates are instantly available as PDFs) and then searched within that page for 1922, the year that, according to an unverified public tree on Ancestry.com, she had died. There were two 1922 deaths of Browns in Vernon County and one of them was a “Nettie Brown.” Ah ha! Nettie could be a nickname for Antoinette. So I clicked the image, and sure enough, her husband was listed as N.P. Brown. My great great grandfather was Newton Perry Brown. Furthermore, her parents’ names matched with the unsourced but reliable information my grandfather had received from a cousin, so I’m confident this is her.

Family Tree Magazine has a great list of nicknames for common female names. So if you’re having trouble finding a female ancestor, that link might help you find some nicknames to search for.It’s a terrific resource!

Using little snippets of time

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I think one thing that made me put off doing family history research for all these years (besides feeling overwhelmed and incompetent) was that I always felt like I needed a giant chunk of time before I could start a research session.

While it’s true that time flies when I’m researching and I can easily use a large chunk of time, it’s not a requirement. Yesterday at about 5:00 I thought about what I’d like to do next with my day. One option was entering financial data into Quickbooks. Family history research was a much more attractive prospect!

I ended up researching for about two hours. In that time, I found one couple (a pair of great great grandparents) on five censuses, thanks to Ancestry.com. I carefully documented what I learned from the censuses into my family tree in Reunion. And it felt great!

Next time you’re tempted to do a little research, but hesitate because you don’t have a whole lot of time, I say go for it!