Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Free access to all of Newspapers.com this weekend!

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In honor of Mother’s Day, Newspapers.com is offering free access to their premium collection through May 9.

I happily pay for a Newspapers.com Publishers Extra subscription because I find so much great information there. But if you’re not a subscriber, I encourage you to give it a whirl for free this weekend. I suggest you check the available newspapers (you can search by state) and make a list of the family members you can search on in various localities before you start.

It’s great to see what kind of news your ancestors may have made. And, of course, finding obituaries can be a treasure trove of information. (Just remember to a grain of salt!)

Personally, I have found lots of little articles about my family members that individually can feel kind of tedious to process but collectively can paint a nice picture. (I find it’s worth the time to download and add the information to my database.) And every now and then I find something more juicy, like an article about my grandfather’s uncle being arrested for assault for beating up a citizen who voted against his father in an election for county judge. (That’s an image of that article from the 4 Nov 1909 edition of the Messenger-Inquirer of Owensboro, Kentucky at the top of this post.)

If you have some time on your hands this weekend, you might enjoy exploring Newspapers.com at no cost. And you might find it helpful to check out my blog post, How I Process Newspaper.com articles.

Before you get started, I encourage you to come up with some research questions. That will help you use you research time well. It’s so easy to fall down a rabbit hole with newspaper research!

1950 Census clue: Sheet 71 and up

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I spent the day with the 1950 U.S. Census on April 1, as anticipated, and I was bleary eyed (and brain dead) by afternoon. But I had a great time. When I found my teenage mother (who passed away in 2015) on the census living with her parents and little brother, I got goose bumps.

I had done a pretty good job of finding enumeration districts (EDs) in advance, which was good, since the search function worked for just one of my people. I had the joy of finding my grandparents when I wasn’t looking for them. (I was looking for my aunt, who was married and in her own home by then and just stumbled upon my grandparents.)

On April 1, I found father (in his fraternity house at Whitman College), my mother living with her parents and grandmother, my paternal grandparents, and two sets of great grandparents. I didn’t find my aunt (my father’s sister, who is still living) though I browsed the EDs I thought she might be living in page by painstaking page. And I also searched in vain for my father’s paternal grandmother. (I’m determined to keep looking!) I’ve processed the documents I found, but I haven’t had a chance to do much more looking. I’m excited to get back to it.

If you’re like me, you’ve seen a lot of “No One At Home” entries on the pages you were looking at. I wanted to share a tip I learned only after I had done all that browsing. For every enumeration district, no matter how many sheets it has, the names of those folks who were re-canvassed after not being at home starts on Sheet 71. An ED might have 30 pages to browse, but it might skip from sheet 26 to sheet 71. So if you find your person’s address and it says No One At Home, I suggest you skip to sheet 71 (and beyond) to if they’re there. (And take comfort in knowing that sheets 26 to 70 in this example aren’t missing.)

I’m going to go back to some of the EDs I browsed looking for my aunt and great grandmother and make sure I pay especially close attention to Sheet 71 and up. I was pretty bleary eyed by the last pages of any ED and I’m hopeful perhaps I just missed them.

If you’d like to read more detail about how enumerators were instructed to handle No One At Home, check out this detailed blog post from the History Hub, the National Archives’ crowdsourced platform: 1950 Census: Enumerated Out-of-Order – “Callbacks” and Others on Page 71 and Up.

Happy hunting!

How I handle married women in my files

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Today I had what I thought was a great idea to write about how I handle married women in my digital files in my own research. But I searched my blog and discovered I’d written about just over a year ago! I still think it’s an interesting topic, so I’m re-running the original post, slightly edited. One thing I discovered with the comments to the original post is that the way I do it may not be the standard way! Most, if not all, of the commenters last year said that they organize the women in their family trees by their birth surname. (I object to the term “maiden name” so will stick to my preferred term, “birth name.”)

I’m by no means saying my way is the right way, but it’s worked well for me for years. I encourage you to read the comments to the original post (linked above), to see how the dozen or so commenters are handling their female ancestors and relatives.

Handling the females in your family tree

Most of the women in our family trees changed their name at some point or another. That can present an organizational conundrum in the files we keep for them. I thought I’d let you know how I handle it in my digital filing system. As always, I’m not telling you the right way to do anything. I just want to share how I do it, because it’s worked well for me.

In a nutshell, I file women under their married surname. (By contrast, in my genealogy software, Reunion, all the women are listed by their birth names and if I don’t know their birth name, I leave the surname blank.) As I describe in the post How I Process a Downloaded Document, I have surname folders on my hard drive for each of the surnames I have researched and within each folder I have folders for individual people. The folders for individuals contain the source documents pertaining to that person. (I have a separate Collateral folder within which the surname folders for collateral relatives are filed using the same folder structure.)

Here’s how I name women’s folders:

Last Name (Birth Name), First Name (YOB-YOD). So the folder for one of my second great grandmother’s folder is called Garlock (Ten Eyck), Anna (1832-1910). It resides in the Garlock Surname folder, as shown in the screenshot above.

If I find a relative before she’s married, I’ll use her birth surname for filing purposes. But once I’ve found marriage documents, I’ll rename and move her folder to her married surname.

It seems pretty straight forward, but of course, things like multiple marriages can make it more complicated. For my direct-line ancestors, it’s easy. I use the surname associated with the spouse who is my direct line. (If it’s a second or later marriage, I don’t typically use the first married name in the folder name, I just use the birth name.)

But for collateral relatives, where there isn’t necessarily a married name that is more relevant to me than the other married names, I typically just use the first married surname that I find and leave it like that.  Sometimes I make exceptions, especially for women who were married multiple times and for whom I have trouble keeping track of their various married names. For example, Leonora Adams, the daughter of my much-researched second great grandfather George Washington Adams, was married four times. I file her within the Adams Collateral folder using the folder name “Adams, Leonora (Lochry Stevens Good Ward), 1877-1962.”

Again, I’m not suggesting this is the best way to do it, but it works for me. I pretty much developed my system as I went along. And, as in almost all things, I allow myself to be imperfect about it. That means that  there may be inconsistencies in my folder structure. But I have enough of a solid infrastructure that the inconsistencies don’t bother me.

Writing this makes me want to go through my folders–particularly for the collateral relatives–and perhaps correct any inconsistencies. But I’m comfortable leaving them as is until I get around to doing that.

I’d love to hear in the comments how you handle the name changes of women in your files. And are there any situations I didn’t cover here that you’re curious about? Feel free to ask in the comments.

For more in-depth information on how I organize my own genealogy, check out How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow, a 37-page downloadable available for $19.99.

My 2022 genealogy goals

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Are you a goal setter? I sure am. Every year I set aside a day to work on my personal and business goals. This year, I did it on December 16. But I ran out of time to consider my personal genealogy goals, so I did that this morning.

I sat down with a pad of paper and I did a little brainstorming session with myself. I achieved some clarity really fast. The release of the 1950 census on April 1 creates a natural break in the year. I decided to focus the first quarter of the year on preparing for that day and cleaning up my existing research. The latter three quarters will be about new research and avoiding a backlog.

So here’s what I decided:

First quarter 2022:

Rest of 2022:

  • Glean as much information from the 1950 census as possible
  • Shift my family focus to the Jeffries line (that’s my maternal grandmother’s line)
  • Do a deep dive on my Civil War ancestor Richard Anderson Jeffries

One overarching intention for the year is to try harder to do daily research. For the last few years, I’ve found that in the absence of a 30 x 30 challenge, I ignore my research. Sometimes, I’m able to sustain daily research for months at a time, but that’s fallen by the wayside. In 2022, I’m going to try to do at least a little something every single day to keep my mind in the game. I know that, for me, that means researching in the early morning. Perhaps I’ll try to go to bed a little earlier so I can get up earlier to accomplish this. I plan a 30 x 30 challenge starting January 1, 2022, so I’ll have that support as I kick off the year.

I realize that I didn’t so much set goals this year as clarify my focus. And that’s good enough for me. It feels great. The plan for the year feels simple and attainable.

If you’ve set goals that you feel like sharing, please share in the comments. I’d love to hear them!

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash