Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Recording negative research

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badsearchAs someone who tries to be an organized genealogist, I think one of the hardest things to remember to do is to make a note of my fruitless searches. When you do a search and get no results, the natural thing to do is to plow ahead and tweak the search and try again or to try searching another collection (or another ancestor).

But if you take the time to document that negative search, you might save yourself from duplicating that fruitless search in the near future (and therefore save yourself some time).

To me, the tricky part is figuring out how to record it. If you’re faithful about a research log (high five!), it seems fairly straightforward to include it in your log.

But if you’re one of those people (and I have to admit to being one of them) who doesn’t record everything faithfully in a log, you might have to devise a system specifically for negative research.

Here’s what I’m going to try. Using Evernote, I’ve created a Negative Research notebook in my Genealogy stack. I’ll try to remember to create a note when I spend time on fruitless research, making note of what I searched for and where, what the results were and when I did the search. By putting surnames in the note, I’ll easily be able to access the note on a simple search in Evernote, if I’m looking for information I stored there on a specific family member.

One caveat: I’m often searching sites like Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org, so I need to bear in mind that they’re constantly adding new collections. So just because a search came up blank one day doesn’t mean that it won’t bear fruit a year (or more or less) down the road. Periodically, I’ll try to remember to check out my Negative Research notebook and see if it’s time to try that search again.

I’m hopeful this system will help me save precious research time.

How about you? Do you record your negative research? If so, how do you do it?

Free access to military records on Find My Past this weekend

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fmpIn honor of Veterans’ Day, FindMyPast, the British-owned genealogy site is offering free access to their 70 million military records this weekend.

You have to register to access them, but there is no cost to register. The records will be available until 11:59 pm (GMT) on Sunday, November 13. (That’s 6:59 pm EST in the US.)

The collections include records from the U.S. and Canada, as well as the UK, Ireland and Australian military.

I’m going to pull out my table of military ancestors and look to see whether FindMyPast has some records I haven’t found before. It seems like a wonderful opportunity to learn more about my military ancestors!

Transpose shutting down December 9

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I have posted here about Transpose, the app I have used to create custom forms, including some forms for my genealogy research.

When I logged in this morning to access some information, I was really disappointed to see the following banner at the top of the site:

transposeclose

I wasted no time exporting my data into spreadsheets or pdfs, as appropriate, so I’ll lose nothing. But I will miss this very easy way to to gather information.

I am getting so tired of hopping on the bandwagon of great apps that then fold (see Springpad). I hope and trust that Evernote is here to stay because I have loads of information stored there. I am encouraged by its popularity and the fact it has a multi-tiered paid model.

But still. This strengthens my resolve to store as much data as possible on my hard drive, rather in the cloud. (Though my resolve was shaken a little a couple of weeks ago when I had to do a clean reinstall of my operating system. It all worked out, though.)

If you starting using Transpose on my recommendation, I’m sorry. Please don’t forget to export your data before December 9!

Find help at National Archives’ new History Hub

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historyhubimageI listened to a portion of the National Archives and Records Administration’s Virtual Genealogy Fair this week. It was terrific. For me, there were two big discoveries and a revelation.

First the discoveries:

  1. The talks, slides and handouts from this year’s Virtual Fair — as well as those from the last three Fairs–are freely available online. So if you missed a talk, or just want to revisit one, it’s there for you. (That took the pressure off to sit at my desk all day!) Click to access the 2015 Fair. Here’s 2014. And 2013.
  2. The National Archives has a new website, History Hub, in beta mode. I think it’s really promising. (More on that in a moment.)

I’ll share the revelation with you next week.

I don’t know about you, but I have always found the NARA website to be challenging to navigate. I know there’s info there (and am I’m so glad I figured out how to find my ancestors’ Civil War pension files), but tracking it down can take some effort.

The talk called Innovative Online Resources and Tools to Help with Your Genealogical Research provided some insight into how to navigate the NARA website. It’s worth checking out the talk if you find the NARA website challenging. In the first part of the talk, presenter Sarah Swanson, pointed out ways to navigate the site, and she revealed the many aspects of the site I had overlooked (including a link to the NARA YouTube channel and 16 NARA special-interest blogs!). I’m going to go through the session slides again and familiarize myself with how I can access the vast online holdings. It will also help me plan a research trip to NARA in Washington, DC, perhaps next year.

The second of the talk was about History Hub, which is described as “A support community managed by the National Archives for researchers, citizen historians, archival professionals, and open government advocates.”  The speaker, Kelly Osborn from NARA’s Innovation Office, likened History Hub to the Apple Support Community. If you’ve ever had a problem on an Apple product and googled it, you’ve probably ended up in the Apple Support Community where your question might be answered by an Apple employee or by a fellow Apple user. You might have asked the question yourself or got you needed by reading the answers to someone else’s question. That’s what the National Archives wants to do with History Hub–it’ll be a place where people can get their genealogy questions answered and learn from others’ questions. I think it’s an amazing idea.

Of course, History Hub is the kind of site that will only get better with age as more people use it and offer their expertise. The idea that I can tap into the knowledge of a subject matter expert from the National Archives–as well as other knowledgeable people–is really exciting. The site is searchable and has discussion boards, blogs and community pages. I think it has huge potential and I think it’s really great that the National Archives is embracing innovation this way.

By the way, if you’re getting an error message when you click on the History Hub link, try it in another browser. I found that the link works in Safari and Chrome, but not in Firefox, at least on my computer.

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When you first join the list, I’ll send you a few emails to help you organize your family history. After that you’ll hear from me at the end of every month when I send an email with links to that month’s posts. And every now and then, I’ll let you know when I have something special to promote.