Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

A great resource for Ancestry.com subscribers

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I’ve been a subscriber to Ancestry.com for years but just this week learned about a resource there that I’m really excited about. In its Learning Center, Ancestry offers a Family History Wiki with some terrific information and links.

I learned about the Wiki while watching an archived Livestream lesson from Ancestry, on finding death records. I clicked on Vital Records at the top, then on the state I was interested in and simple as that, I got the information I need about the availability of vital records and how to go about getting them. In the past, my first choice in searching for vital records from a specific state has been Google. Now it’s going to be this Wiki. So far, I’ve used the Wiki only for vital records, but there are sections on census records, immigration records, military records, African American research, Jewish American research and more.

Much of the vital record information provided comes from the resource, Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources. I’m so excited at how easily accessible the information is!

This is just one of the many reasons that I am happy to fork over $155 a year to Ancestry. I have found it to be an invaluable resource. I’m hopeful that their recent acquisition (as reported on Family Tree’s Genealogy Insider blog) by the European private equity firm Permira doesn’t affect the quality and accessibility of the content.

I clearly have not explored the learning opportunities available via Ancestry. Time to do more investigating of the Learning Center!

Pinning my map

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The first pins on my genealogy mapI wrote a couple of weeks ago that I was purchasing a large map of the United States so that I could mark where my ancestors lived and get a better sense of my geographic origins. I figure it will also be helpful in planning research trips. Mapping my genealogy has proven to be great fun.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought as to how to mark the map. I didn’t know if I should include just birth places, just death places or both. Should I include marriage places? How would indicate who a pin represented? Should I color code? If so, how many colors? What kind of pins?

After a week or two of thought, yesterday I settled on this strategy:

  • I’m using one-inch-long pins with colored heads
  • I’m color-coding the pins by branch of family (to match the way I’ve color-coded my paper files, one color per grandparent and his/her ancestors)
  • I’m marking both birth and death places
  • Each pin is the appropriate color and has a flag on it indicating the ancestor and birth or death date

I’m using Avery return address labels (#5167) for the flags.  That seems to be a good size to capture the information legibly. On the first line, I put first and middle initials and last name. On the second line is the birth or death date. The info is right justified. Once I’ve printed out the label, I fold it in half around the pin and it sticks to itself.

I’ve decided to pin systematically and have started with my grandparents and great grandparents. Once I finish pinning all the ancestors for whom I have verified information and the backlog is complete, I’m anticipating the thrill of adding a pin when I establish the birth and death date of an ancestor.

I’m kind of shocked at how fun and rewarding this is. Time is flying as I work on it. A side benefit is that it’s making me realize the ancestors for whom I’m missing birth cities or counties (my paternal grandparents, for instance!).

This is just one of the many ways that family history research is such a fun and satisfying hobby for me.

Planning a genealogy research trip

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I live in St. Louis and my maternal roots go back to western Missouri. My mother was born in Jefferson City, but moved to Spokane, Washington, in 1936 with her family. I grew up in Washington and always knew I had Missouri cousins. Though I’ve lived in Missouri for 23 years, I’ve yet to seek out those cousins, nor travel to the area (some four or five hours away) to try to track down genealogy records.

But now that I’m back into the family history research, I’m itching to go on a genealogy research trip. Looking at my calendar, I see that I have three free days next week, so the thought occurred to me that that might be just the time to take a little road trip to look into the Browns and the Jeffries.

Of course, as an organized person, I know that such a research trip will require some planning if it’s going to be productive. But I have to admit that when I think about planning it, my head starts spinning a little. So I figure what I need to do before I take such a trip is the following:

  • See how many of the four western Missouri counties in my database I can realistically fit in a quick trip
  • Choose the counties I’d like to visit
  • Figure out what family members I’d like to research, what records I already have and what I’d like to track down
  • Locate the cemeteries where I know folks were buried, based on death certificates
  • Create a list of other family members who might be buried in those cemeteries
  • Find out where I might be able to obtain the records I seek
  • Know just what I’m looking for when I go to courthouses or libraries
  • Figure out where to stay
  • Figure out driving routes
  • Ask my mother for names of cousins I might reach out to

When I write it all down like that, the spinning in my head slows down somewhat. I need to remind myself that I don’t have to get everything done in one visit. I can take plenty more road trips. But I do want to put some planning into my first one so that it’s at least somewhat productive.

This sounds like great fun. I will post the results (and some photos) here, after the research trip takes place!

Playing with Ages in Reunion 10

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I haven’t had a lot of time to play around with the Reunion 10, the family-tree software I use on my Mac, but one thing I have enjoyed is the Ages feature. I don’t know if this was available on Reunion 9, but if it was, it wasn’t as accessible.

Here’s how it works: Click on a couple in the Family View and on Ages in the left sidebar and in the right sidebar you’ll see exactly how old they were at the various that are entered in their event database. (You can toggle between the two members of the couple.)

For me, this brings these people back to life. I see, for example, that my maternal grandmother, Susie Brown, was 22 years, 9 months and 4 days old when she married my grandfather. And that she was between 25 and 33 when she moved from Missouri to Washington state. (I know that trip occurred in 1936, so she was actually 28 or 29.) I’d always known that my mother was 3 years old when that migration occurred, but I’d never thought about it from my grandmother’s perspective.

Perhaps since I always remembered my grandmother as an old person, I never bothered to think about what it must have been like for her, as a young woman, to move to a strange (perhaps exotic) part of the country. I haven’t really thought about what the over-the-road trip (this was before airplanes were commonly used) with two small children must have been like.

Of course, this makes me wish I’d quizzed her and my mother more when I was growing up. It’s not too late to ask my mother, but she’ll have no memory of the actual move. But she can share family lore.

Simply playing around with the Ages feature on one relative has sparked a whole line of inquiry. I can’t wait to see what it sparks as I use it more.

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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.