Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Let’s create history for our descendants this Thanksgiving

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Once again, here’s my annual Thanksgiving post, originally written three years ago. I wish all my readers a wonderful Thanksgiving!

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.)

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.

Preparing for a deep dive

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When I started doing genealogy research almost a decade ago, I was all about identifying my direct-line ancestors and making my tree taller. I committed to not adding anyone to my tree, thank goodness, unless I had at least one documented source that linked that person to my family. But once I added someone and filled in the basic birth, marriage, death and census data, I moved on.

Then, a few years later, I realized that I would benefit from adding collateral relatives to the tree. (It seems painfully obvious to me now, but it didn’t when I started.) All along, I struggled with maintaining focus and, in 2014, I devised a strategy of focusing on one of my four lines per quarter, rather than jumping all over my family tree when I sat down to research.

Three years later, in 2017, I decided to spend a year on one line, my paternal grandfather’s line (Adams) and then extended that year to 18 months. I tried shifting gears to my paternal grandmother’s line (Rasco), but the Adamses keep drawing me back.

The Adams family was the focus of my recent Kentucky research trip. Specifically, I’ve spent the majority of my time on my 2nd great grandfather, George Washington Adams (1845-1938).

When I attended the National Genealogical Society conference in May, I heard Elizabeth Shown Mills talk four times. Several of those talks have inspired me to dig deeper on this ancestor. Her talk on context, in particular, had a big impact. In it she offered an explanation for why context is so important, along with specific suggestions for how to find context for our ancestors’ lives. It really makes me want to try to understand what life was like for this man and his family.

Why George? He fought for the Union in the Civil War, and I sent away for his pension file back in 2015. It was a thick one: 138 documents and 236 scanned pages. But I realize now it only gave me a window into a small portion of his life. I transcribed that file so I became very familiar with his life while he was living in the National Home for Disabled Soldiers from 1922-1933 and the five years after he left it until his death. (He would move from adult child to adult child fairly frequently and telegraph the pension office every time he did it so he wouldn’t miss a check.) But none of those documents gave me an inkling that he served in the state legislature in the 1890s and early 1900s and also was a magistrate during that time. That I gleaned through newspaper research later.

After his first wife died in 1902, he had a seemingly acrimonious second marriage, with two divorce filings (one of which was completed). He had twelve children, and his youngest child was born 40 years after his oldest (my great grandfather, Elmer Henry Adams).

All this interesting on the face of it. But what I want to do is to research it within the context of life at the time he was living. And once I’ve done that, I’d like to revisit the many documents I have for him and look at them in the proper context.

I think I’ll start with more newspaper research. (Instead of searching for familiar names, I’ll actually read the articles.) I’d like to research some of the people who lived around him to help fill out the picture as well. The syllabus from Elizabeth Shown Mills’ talk on context will be a guide for the types of sources I can consult to really paint a picture of the 93 years during which George Washington Adams lived.

But before I get started, I want to process the documents I found during my research trip, which will be the focus of this month’s 30 x 30 challenge for me. But I’m excited to dig into George’s life and times and see where it takes me!

Photo by Amy Lister on Unsplash

Time of day matters with cemetery photos

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As I’m processing the photos I took on my Kentucky research trip, I’m realizing an important aspect of research-trip planning that I hadn’t taken into account: the time of day I visit cemeteries.

On my June 2019 trip, I visited two cemeteries I’d seen in October 2014. I took pictures in both cemeteries on both trips–there was more to discover on my second trip, since I knew more about my family tree. One thing I noticed is that my 2014 photos taken at noon at the Sacramento Cumberland Presbyterian Church are so much better than the ones I took at 6 pm in my June 2019 trip to that cemetery. (The I visited the other cemetery, Poplar Grove Cemetery, at the same both trips, about 2 pm.)

Taken 16 Sep 2014, 12:07 pm

grave marker taken in good light

 

Taken 24 June 2019, 6:04 pm

grave marker taken in poor light

I understand there are all sorts of variables that can go into getting a great shot, but you can see that the first photo, taken on a partly cloudy day at noon, is much better than the second photo, taken on sunny June day at 6 pm. It doesn’t help that the grave marker faces east! (Since I knew I had a great shot of that grave marker, I didn’t worry much about the quality of that second photo.)

Here’s another example, of the marker for my second great uncle, Ellsworth McEuen, in the same cemetery:

Taken 16 Sep 2014, 12:35 pm

Taken 24 June 2019, 6:03 pm

 

On my next research trip that includes cemeteries, I will do my best to visit them when the sun is high to avoid these challenges!

Processing the information I gleaned on my research trip

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1912 divorce caseI hope I’m not boring you with my research trip! It’s taking up most of my genealogy-related thoughts these days. After a glorious five days focused solely on family-history research, I’ve had to get to back to other responsibilities. So it seems really important for me to have a plan in place to to process all the information and photographs that I captured during my trip. In the absence of such a process, I think I’d be in real danger of losing some valuable information.

I put together a little plan to capture all this information and I’m in the midst of these efforts now. Today, I thought I’d share what I’m doing to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

These are my areas of concern:

  • Documents captured by my phone camera
  • Printed documents that were waiting for me at the Daviess County Public Library
  • Photographs taken at cemeteries
  • Questions/challenges that came up along the way

On this trip, most of the documents I captured took the form of photos on my phone. If I’d planned better, I would have taken them through an app, like Genius Scan, that makes a tidier photo, saved as pdf, and prompts me to email it to myself or export it to Dropbox or Evernote or elsewhere. But I didn’t plan that far in advance and instead just clicked away on my phone. This would be a problem if I let them languish on my immense, ill-organized photo library on my phone. So instead, I’m moving each important image from my phone into my Surnames folder and renaming each using my file-naming protocol, just like I do with downloaded documents. I’m giving priority to this process (rather than to actually gleaning all the information from the document immediately), so I’ve created a folder called Documents found on my 2019 Kentucky Research Trip, where I’m placing the renamed files to process soon. As soon as all the photos are copied from my photo library, I’ll process each of them just like I process documents I download.

The printed documents I’ll simply scan and either put into that holding folder or just process them right after scanning. There were only a handful of those, primarily obituaries.

Believe it or not, I did no photocopying and no scanning at any of the repositories I visited. I just took pictures with my phone. If I’d been getting information from large books, I would have wanted to use a machine to copy or scan. But most of what I looked at were loose pages from vertical files or case files so the phone was very easy. (And encouraged by the repositories.)

With the cemetery photos, I’m copying particularly helpful ones to my hard drive just like the documents. They’ll go into my folder structure, be filed by ancestor and used a source document in Reunion.

As for the questions and challenges, I did a pretty good job of keeping a log in Evernote each day, taking of note of next steps and questions that came up. I could leave them there, but what I think I’ll do is move them to Trello. I’ve been wanting to experiment with Trello for my genealogy task list. (I use it for so many other things in my life and business.) On July 4, reader Jerry Hereford was generous enough to share how he sets that up in Trello in a comment on this post and I want to give his method a try. You can bet that I’ll be writing about how that turns out!

It was really important to me not to let real life grab all my time before I set up a system to fully benefit from everything I learned on the research trip. For the next month, probably, that will be my focus. I really need to act on this information while it’s fresh in my mind!

If you have any suggestions for other things I need to do, I’m all ears!