Keep looking for new evidence

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.