Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

BCGS presentation on Presentism

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I have to admit that “Presentism” isn’t a term I had been familiar with when I received an email from Donna Cox Baker about her upcoming virtual presentation on presentism in genealogy for the Bucks County Genealogical Society. (The title of the talk is Our Founding Fathers Would What? Presentism in Genealogical and Historical Research.) When I clicked for more details I learned that “Presentism is a type of historical bias in which our understanding of the present influences or clouds how we evaluate and interpret the past. Historians take great pains to avoid presentism—and genealogists should be on guard for it also.”

This topic is so intriguing to me when seen through the lens of genealogist. I think this presentation from Donna, who is a history scholar and professor (and friend of this blog!) will be fascinating. It will be held on May 4 from 10 to noon eastern time. Registration opens on April 29.

I’m participating in a neighborhood yard sale on May 4 so won’t be able to attend live but the topic sounds so interesting that I’m tempted to sign up so I can watch the recording. The fee for the program is $5 for members and $10 for non-members. Membership is $20 a year and only members have access to a recording of the program, which is available for 30 days.

To learn a little more about Donna Cox Baker, you can read her How They Do It interview on this blog as well as her guest post on organizing genealogy research with Zotero.

Contact that courthouse: It might pay off!

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Not all genealogy documents are available on the internetIt can be challenging for me to pick up the phone or even send an email when I can’t find what I’m looking for online. But in 2017, when I originally wrote this post, I had a beneficial experience by doing just that. I thought you might appreciate this little nudge to step away from your online searching, so I’m running this post again.

Like many people, I rely primarily on documents I find by searching the internet. When do I library or cemetery research trip, I find information not available online, but when I’m in my office, I search online and if I don’t find what I’m looking for I typically move on.

I know it’s possible to contact courthouses or state archives for documents but over the years I’ve done little of that. In the last couple of weeks, however, I hit the jackpot when I took that extra step.

I’ve been working on transcribing the Civil War pension file of George Washington Adams, my 2nd great grandfather. In it was a divorce decree for his 1920 divorce from his second wife, Della. (I’m descended from his first wife, Henrietta.) That piqued my curiosity because it gave George custody of their “infant son” and the only son I knew about was 12 at the time of the divorce. I wondered if there was another son and also why the 75-year-old father was given custody over the 50-year-old mother. The decree referred to pleadings and depositions in the case and I wanted to get my hands on those. It was Christmas, so I couldn’t pick up the phone (and I don’t like picking up the phone), so I wrote a letter to the Circuit Court Clerk of McLean county, Kentucky.

To my delight, just a few days letter, she got back to me telling me that the documents I sought were in the State Archives and giving me a little extra information to make easier for the archivist to find them. She also gave me a phone number for the Archives. So I called and talked to a lovely young man and gave him a credit card number. That very same day he emailed me photos of the entire file. I think it cost me $8. If I’d wanted, he would have mailed a certified copy but I didn’t want to wait that long. (And get this: He added another divorce petition that I didn’t even know about! Six years into their 14-year marriage, Della filed for divorce from George, but she must have dropped it.)

The 30-page divorce file he sent had numerous depositions and probably sparked as many questions as it answered, but it’s another treasure trove. Turns out there was only one son from this marriage, Horace, who was indeed 12 at the time of the divorce. Apparently the word infant was used differently 100 years ago! But George went into the Old Soldier’s Home just two years later, so now I need to find out what happened to teenage Horace! [Note from 2024 Janine: I did find Horace on the 2020 census living with his older half brother.]

Neither the pension file nor this divorce file are available online, though I did order the pension file online. Both are outstanding sources of information about this ancestor. I’m processing the divorce file like I’m processing the pension file, by transcribing the documents and properly sourcing every fact I glean from them.

I encourage you to look beyond those documents available online, even if you’re not in a position to travel. There’s a whole world of documents that haven’t yet been digitized!

Four habits to make your research easier

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I stumbled on this post I wrote a year ago and I liked it so much I thought I would share it again. Creating great habits in any aspect of your life tends to make your life easier. The more we can do habitually, the less we have to think about doing it. I encourage you to consider incorporating these four habits into your genealogy life!

I’m a huge fan of creating beneficial habits. When you have a habit going, it becomes automatic–at least for awhile! And when that happens, life gets easier. (You might enjoy listening to Episode 22 of the podcast I co-hosted, Getting to Good Enough, called Creating Helpful Habits.)

I got to thinking about the genealogy habits that benefit me and four jumped to mind. Your future self will thank you if you do these four things every time you research:

  1. Rename the files you download. Having a consistent file-naming protocol will help make sure you don’t lose valuable documents on your hard drive. (See this blog post if you’re interested in my file-naming protocol and folder structure.)
  2. Process each document right after you download it. By process, I mean extract all the data from it and enter it in your genealogy software. Be sure to create a source citation (see #3 below). If you do this, you won’t have an ever-present backlog of unprocessed documents nagging at you. And you get to further your research!
  3. Create a source citation for every document and assign a source to every fact. In my genealogy life no fact goes into my database (I use Reunion) without a source citation. That’s how I know I can trust my research. (And so can other people.)
  4. Log your research during each session or, at the very least, write out your next steps. It is so useful to be able to pull up your research log and see where you left off. It eliminates that overwhelming question, “What should I research today?” (Here’s a post on my very informal research log.)

The good news is that while these habits are important, they’re not hard. I encourage you to work on creating great genealogy habits. It can take some of the frustration out of the research process. You want your genealogy research to be as frustration-free as possible!

For detailed information on how I organize my own genealogy research, check out my Orderly Roots Guide, How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow, available for $19.99.

Quick Tip #44: When in doubt, leave it out

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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 is a good adage to apply to your genealogy research.

When in doubt, leave it out

If you want to build a reliable tree, you need to be very careful about what you add to it. If you’re not sure that an ancestor you’ve come across in your research is your ancestor, don’t add that person to your tree until you’ve done more research to verify that this is your person. That doesn’t mean you should ignore the clue; you can park it somewhere. I use follow-up folders organized by surname in Apple Notes to store that information. (I am in the process of switching over to Apple Notes from Evernote for my research log and follow up folders.)

This applies to sources, as well as people.  I don’t add any fact to my tree that I can’t back up with a source. And I want to make sure it’s a reliable source before I add it to the tree.

As someone who created a very unreliable tree in the beginning, I think it’s worthwhile to take a slow and meticulous approach to make sure that my tree is rock solid.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash