Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Keeping track of my progress

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Keeping track of genealogy researchThis year, I’ve been focusing on one family line, the Adams line. I’ve been trying to gather as much information as possible not just on my direct-line ancestors (my focus in past years) but also on the siblings of my direct-line ancestors. It’s fun and fulfilling. But it’s also a bit overwhelming because there are so many people I can’t remember all of them.

I keep track of everything in my family-tree software, Reunion. But I also like having an at-a-glance summary of where I stand in my research on each person. Three years ago, I created a progress chart, which had a series of tabs on a spreadsheet in which I marked the documents I had found on each of my direct-line ancestors. That worked pretty well and gave me an at-a-glance summary I craved.

I find myself wanting a similar chart for all my research subjects, including the collateral lines, and I’m struggling with getting my arms around that. Part of my problem, I think, is that I want to be able to see everything at the same time, which is challenging when your family tree’s branches stretch wide.

Here’s what I’ve settled on. I’m creating a single spreadsheet for all the data I’m looking for for each family group (B/M/D, censuses, newspaper, military, wills, land, etc.). In my previous progress chart, I’d had all my direct-line ancestors listed on each sheet, with a separate sheet for each type of data. In this new chart, I have all my data types across the top, with a row for each member of the family group. I have a separate sheet (a tab) for each family group. I decided to start with my parents in the first sheet and work back in time by generation.

I’ve spent a little time with it and I think it’s going to be really helpful. As I started filling it out, I paid attention to how it made me feel and I had two conflicting feelings:

  • Overwhelm because there are so many people to enter into it and so many data types to research
  • Excitement as I realized how many opportunities for research there are

I think the key to making this useful and not overwhelming is putting one family group on each sheet. That narrows the focus and allows me to see what I have and what I can still research. It also helps me avoid feeling overwhelmed.

Having each family group on a separate sheet makes it easier to fill out the chart initially as well. I ordinarily enjoy filling out forms and updating progress charts. But this one was so large it felt like it might turn into a big exercise in tedium. So if I take it one family group at a time, it feels like fun, not drudgery.

I’ll keep you posted. Once I have it in shape where I think it might be useful to others, I’ll blog again and offer to send it to anyone who might want to use it.

If you have a similar chart and/or have any suggestions for mine, please share in the comments. I’m all ears!

Take newspaper information with a grain of salt

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Just under a month ago, I wrote a post called Using newspapers to fill in the blanks in which I was very enthusiastic about newspapers and the discoveries they might contain. I still am.

A week before that, I wrote a post called Those Eureka! moments, in which I described finding a newspaper article that confirmed that a family I’d been researching was indeed related to me.

Newspaper research can be so fun and rewarding. But here’s a friendly reminder: Just because it’s in the newspaper doesn’t make it true.

Case in point: The article I described in the Eureka post did indeed provide the link I needed, which I have verified. But it also had a wrong cause of death for Mrs. G. W. Adams (Elizabeth Major Adams, 1889-1929). The article says she died of “an attack of influenza…with resulting heart complications.” Her death certificate, by contrast, says she died in childbirth. And cemetery records listing a single grave with “Elizabeth and Baby Adams” substantiate that information.

Why the newspaper said she died of influenza, I don’t know. But it’s a reminder that double checking facts in newspaper articles (or at least taking those facts with a grain of salt) is a good idea.

Processing newspaper articles (screencast)

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Last week I blogged about how I’ve been finding newspaper articles about my father’s family in Olympia, Washington, in the first part of the 20th century. Despite being the state capital, Olympia’s newspaper has a decidedly small-town feel. I was able to find a couple of dozen (if not more) articles about my family, each of which gives me a little nugget of information and a little more of a sense of how they lived.

This morning, I created a twelve-minute screencast of how I process these articles. If you haven’t set up a process yourself, you might find it helpful.

As I said in the screencast, this is one of probably many ways to do it and it’s not necessarily the best way, but it works for me.

To summarize the steps, here’s what I do:

  • Click on the article in Genealogy Bank
  • Click the PDF button to get a pdf of the full page
  • Open the page in Preview
  • Zoom in on the article itself
  • Use Grab to take a screenshot of just the article, in an easily readable size
  • Name the full-page pdf, using my file-naming protocol, and file it in the Surnames folder
  • Copy the name and paste into the filename of the zoomed-in snip, adding the word “snip” to the first part of the file name
  • Add one fact from the article in Reunion, creating a source record for the article
  • Paste the source information from the Reunion source record into the Comments section of the two image files in Finder
  • Move the full-page and the snip file from the Surnames folder to the appropriate subfolder for the person mentioned in the article
  • Drag the image files into the Multimedia area of the source record in Reunion
  • Glean the rest of the information, attaching the newly created source to each fact

Watching the screencast will probably make that more understandable.

I hope you find it helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions!

Using newspapers to fill in the blanks

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I’ve been limiting my research to the Adams line of my family this year. I love the focus that gives me and there has been no shortage of information to ferret out!

Recently, I’ve been looking at newspaper articles in Olympia, Washington, where this family lived in the first four decades of the 20th century. The Daily Olympian (which I access via Genealogy Bank) was full of articles about things we wouldn’t consider of much interest today (like family members who live in the same town visiting one another). These articles help paint a picture of my ancestors’ lives and occasionally help connect dots.

For example, I read that my great great grandfather’s second wife, Della Adams, was critically ill in 1930 and that her son, Wayne Horace Adams, traveled to be at her side at the hospital all the way from Maryland, where he was attending the U.S. Naval Academy. I don’t know how he traveled cross country or how long it took, but it reveals a devotion that is an interesting detail as I try to piece together this family’s puzzling early life. In 1919, according to divorce documents, Della abandoned Horace (as he was known then) to the care of his 74-year-old father (my great great grandfather, George Washington Adams), when he was 12. As a 23-year-old he crossed the country to be with her when she was critically ill. By then, his father was living in the National Soldier’s Home in Danville, Illinois. (Della recovered from her illness and  lived another 13 years.)

These newspaper articles also have allowed me to see how active my great grandmother, Hattie, was in various societies, like the Daughter of Union Veterans and the Daughters of America. I’m also learning the various cities where my grandfather’s sister lived. And I came across a delightful article on a badminton tournament that my own grandparents played in together.

I have the good fortune that my grandfather, Dave Adams, was a reporter for the Daily Olympian when he was in his twenties. So I was able to find some first-person articles that gave me some insight into his life (as well as a picture of him at work). I think my favorite was when he wrote about participating in a spelling bee. He was an excellent writer.

I spent a few hours on Sunday with the newspaper and was faced with the challenge of whether to be selective about which articles I downloaded or to take everything I found. Downloading and processing the articles can get quite tedious, so I wanted to be selective. But I know that even the smallest detail might shed light on a future quandary. (Of course, I have to bear in mind that newspaper articles are not always accurate, but they can provide some great clues.)

So I downloaded with abandon and decided that a few of the articles would reside in the appropriate person’s folder on my hard drive without necessarily getting entered as a source in my genealogy software. But the vast majority are being used as sources because a nugget–even if it’s just a data point about residence–can be gleaned.

In the near future, I plan to outline here how exactly I process these newspaper articles, in hopes that it will be helpful. (I plan to do a screencast.)

How about you? Do you use newspapers in your research? What’s your favorite source for relevant newspaper articles? And what’s the most helpful thing you’ve found in your newspaper research?