Organize Your Family History

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My podcast is coming back!

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Heads up: This is not genealogy related!  I wanted to let you know that my co-host, Shannon Wilkinson, and I have decided to restart the weekly podcast, Getting to Good Enough, that we hosted for five years from 2018 to 2023. At that time, we decided to shut it down because it had stopped being fun and our lives had become a little complicated. But two years later we realized we missed talking with one another every week and we decided to bring it back.

Getting to Good Enough is a podcast about letting go of perfectionism so you can live life with more ease, less stress and a lot more laughter. It’s a free-wheeling conversation between two close friends who discuss life’s challenges and successes, all through the lens of letting go of perfectionism. Many of our listeners have told us it’s like sitting at the kitchen table with us while we chat over a cup of coffee.

In our first run, we published 254 episodes. They’re all still available to listen to. We’re relaunching with four “Best of GTGE” episodes, the second of which will be published tomorrow, August 14. The first new episodes will start airing on Thursday, September 4 and we’ll publish one every Thursday. And this time around, the podcast will be available in video as well as audio formats. You can listen on the website or on your podcast platform of choice. Or you can watch on YouTube.

Shannon and I both enjoy family history research and we did do one episode, Episode 20, focused on genealogy. If you want, you can listen to now if you’d like. I suspect the topic might come up in future episodes as well.

We recorded the first new episode yesterday and it was so fun to get back into it. We’re a little rusty, but I know it will get easier. Podcast technology has changed a lot in the last seven years, so we’re experiencing a bit of a learning curve. We figure it’s good for our brains.

If you enjoy listening to podcasts, I hope you’ll give us a try once the new episodes start airing on September 4! You can sign up at the podcast website to receive an email whenever new episodes are published.

We shot a little a trailer, if you’re interested. Be sure and watch to the end!

How I processed my Civil War pension files

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I’m fortunate to have three ancestors who fought on the Union side in the Civil War and for whom I was able to obtain pension files from the National Archives. Ten years ago, I wrote a post about how I processed those files, starting with creating a robust source citation. I got good feedback on the post, so I thought I’d resurrect it in case newer readers would find it helpful. The pension files truly are treasure troves of information and the painstaking time I spent going through them paid off. If you want to request your ancestor’s pension file, you can do so on this page of the NARA website.

Processing civil war pension filesAs I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I received my 3d great grandfather’s Civil War pension files from the National Archives in record time. I’d been prepared to wait 45 to 120 days and it arrived the week after I submitted the request online.

I dug right in and started processing the information. I was so grateful that I had attended the class Anatomy of a Military Pension, presented by Certified Genealogist Julie Miller at the National Genealogical Society’s annual conference that month. She provided step-by-step instructions of what to do with a military pension.

So the day after I received that 65-page pension file, I did what Julie suggested. I put the documents in chronological order and I assigned a number to each. Then I figured out a citation for the overall file and a  citation for each of the numbered documents.

Coming up with a proper citation was a bit of a challenge and I emailed Julie, who was kind enough to share the citation she uses for these files. (She had given us that info in the talk, but I hadn’t written it down.)

Here’s the citation I’m using for the overall pension file for my ggggrandfather, Richard Anderson Jeffries:

[278] Jeffries, Richard Anderson (1st Sgt., Company D, 13th Regiment, Missouri Volunteer Infantry, Civil War), application no. 567612, certificate no. 529585, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications, 1861-1934; Civil War and Later Pension Files; Department of Veteran Affairs, Record Group 15; National Archives, Washington, D.C.

278 was the next number in my source list in Reunion, my family tree software. Each of the individual documents is numbered, starting with 1, and has its own citation. My intention is that when I enter a fact into Reunion, I’ll use Source 278, but I’ll include in the detail field which of the 26 individual documents that particular fact came from.

I created citation labels for each of the documents and affixed them to the appropriate pages. (That’s the citation for document 16 above.) Then I scanned the whole document into a pdf. I elected to have one pdf, rather than 26 individual ones–time will tell whether that was a good choice. (Edited to add a year later: Yes! That was a great choice.)

The next step, according to Julie is to transcribe the documents. Yes, I’m going to type word for word exactly what is on the documents. Julie urged us not to skip that step because when we transcribe, we learn things we would not otherwise learn.

After I transcribe, I will abstract the documents, so I can tell at a glance what they are and what info is contained within each. And then I’ll enter the new-found facts into Reunion, my family-tree software.

That’s a lot of work, but I’m delighted to have learned how to be thorough with it. And I know I’ll learn so much about my ancestor.

I am so grateful to have this structure, because just a few days after receiving Richard Anderson Jeffries’s file, I received the pension file for my gggrandfather, George Washington Adams. That file is over 100 pages; I had to request and pay for the rest of the file (another 80 pages) to be copied–I’m still waiting for part two. That same week I received the third and final pension file, for another gggrandfather, Benjamin Franklin Igleheart. All three pension files, probably 250 pages, came within two weeks of my request.

If I did not have the structure Julie provided in that talk to thoroughly process the information, I know I would feel overwhelmed. I would probably skim the documents, pluck out a few easy-to-find facts, and put them away intending to get to them later. And I don’t know when later would be.

I have skimmed the most recently received pension files to get a preview what I’m going to learn. (G.W. Adams had a big dispute about the amount of his pension–an adversary in the Soldier’s Home turned him in for saying he was more disabled than he was!) But I’m not going to analyze them until I’m finished with Richard Anderson Jeffries. So that will be motivation to go through the process.

I think these pension files are going to be a great learning experience not just about my ancestors, but also about doing proper genealogical research. This feels great!

Thanksgiving is a great time to create history for our descendants

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For those of us in the U.S.,  it’s Thanksgiving week. I originally wrote this Thanksgiving post in 2016, and I like repeating it every year. Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers! I am grateful for you!

This Thanksgiving week, I’ve been thinking about how the ordinary lives of my ancestors are endlessly fascinating to me. As I slowly plow through my great great grandfather’s Civil War pension file, I get very excited when I come to a form he filled out 125 years ago that has a little extra information in it (like the names and birth dates of his children). Any peek into what his life was like is a special treat.

It got me thinking about how mundane aspects of our lives today might be really interesting 100 years from now to the people below us on the family tree.

Of course, we fill out fewer paper forms now. And genealogy will probably look very different in the twenty-second century. But I think photos and records will always be valuable.

This year, as we celebrate Thanksgiving (or really just go about our lives), we have the opportunity to create history for our descendants. We can be mindful of our legacy as we’re taking pictures. We can take care to label them (or add metadata to digital photos) so future generations know who the people in the photos are. We can do oral history interviews and carefully preserve them with labels for future generations.

If you have older relatives around your Thanksgiving table, I urge you to ask questions and preserve those conversations for generations to come (as well as for your own genealogy research). I sure wish I had. Wouldn’t it be great to put your hands on a recorded interview with one of your ancestors? You could be the person making that possible for your descendants.

Thanks to smartphone technology, it’s so easy for us to record conversations and take videos. Let’s do that while we can and mindfully tag and back up those recordings. (And hope that the medium will still be readable decades from now.) Or we can do what Stacy Julian does and ask our relatives to fill out a simple form.

As much as I urge my organizing clients to part with paper or other items that don’t serve any purpose any longer, I do sometimes encourage them to hang on to documents or photographs that might be of interest to their descendants. I encourage you to be mindful of that and store those items that so that they might be passed on to family-history-minded descendants when you pass.

Remember: Every day we have the opportunity to create history.

Photo by Robert and Pat Rogers via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Quick Tip #45: Have a genealogy email address

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Here’s the next in my occasional series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) post every now and then on a small topic that pops into my head. This one could turn into a time saver!

Create an email address for genealogy

Keeping track of email is a challenge for the best of us. (You do not want to see how many emails I have in my inbox right now!) One way you can make genealogy life a little easier is to create a dedicated email address specifically for emails related to your research. So if you are reaching out to cousins, repositories, or DNA matches you send your inquiries from that address and use that address on any contact forms. How you create a new email address and filter the responses depends on your email client, so I won’t go into that here. I just want to plant the seed that having an email address dedicated to genealogy might make your life a little bit easier!.