Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Preparing for my repository trip

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Preparing for a genealogy research tripOn August 14, less than two weeks from now, I leave for my week-long research excursion to the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, a six-hour drive from my home in St. Louis. This is a National Genealogical Society research trip. I paid $750 (including hotel) and I am really excited to get my money’s worth!

I know I need to spend some time preparing so that my time there is well spent. With all the possibilities of things to research, narrowing it down is one of my biggest challenges. I went to a talk at the Midwestern Roots Family History and Genealogy Conference earlier this month on preparing for a repository trip (see my last post), so I have a game plan. After hearing that talk, as well as a talk on the library’s holdings, I’m planning to focus my research on one locality. I have a cluster of ancestors who lived in Kentucky in the 1800s to early 1900s. I’m going to focus on McLean and Muhlenberg Counties.

I have a multi-pronged approach to this research preparation:

  • Searching the library’s holdings for information on this locality and adding to a spreadsheet of specific books and microfilm rolls I want to look at.
  • Making sure the items I’ve found aren’t readily available on the internet, so I know my time at the library is spent looking at resources I can’t readily find elsewhere.
  • Looking through my existing research for holes, mysteries, and clues I could explore at the library. I’m adding those to a separate sheet on the spreadsheet. I won’t necessarily ignore non-Kentucky mysteries, but I’ll put them lower on my priority list.
  • I also plan to go through my paper files for those ancestors to make sure there aren’t any resources there that I didn’t manage to get on my hard drive. I’m thinking that I’ll take along my computer, but not my paper files, so I’ll try to scan and file anything I’d missed.

That’s a pretty labor-intensive list for two weeks but I’m trying to do a little each day and also spend more time with it on the weekends. I know that any effort at all will be beneficial, even if I don’t get to all of it.

I love the idea of homing in on one locality. That’s helping me stay focused and not feel overwhelmed.

Do any of you experienced researchers have any advice for me that you’d like to share?

Digging deeper

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diggingdeeperI really enjoyed the Midwestern Roots family history and genealogy conference I attended last weekend in Indianapolis. The speakers were excellent and the content was really rich. And I met three of my blog readers, Candace, Jean and Judi. It was great  sitting down with them and getting to know one them. And it was wonderful running into ready-made friends throughout the  conference.

My big take away from the conference is that I want to dig deeper about my ancestors. Looking back at my blog, I saw that I wrote about this 18 months ago when I returned from RootsTech, in a post called It’s not about climbing the tree. This has been a recurring theme in my research and my thought process. But this year it feels a little different, because I left with some real tools I can use for that excavation. And I have a week at the Allen County Public Library’s Genealogy Center next month where I can really get into it.

Here are some highlights of the conference for me:

  • I went to not one but three talks by Curt Witcher, the senior manager for special collections at the Allen County Public Library, in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. He did the opening keynote on the importance of telling stories in genealogy. That prompted me to attend his talk on how find those stories. And then, of course, I went to his talk on the holdings of his library. He’s an amazing speaker–I’m pretty sure I’d sign up to hear him talk on just about anything. He has a wonderful sense of humor–there was  a great deal of laughter in all his talk. But he is also so expressive that he actually brought people (and himself) to tears in the opening session. His message of filling in the stories between the birth and death dates had a big impact on me.
  • A priority talk for me was the one by Deena Coutant about how to prepare for a repository trip. Luckily for me it was in the second session and it provided a great groundwork for my thoughts throughout the conference on how best to use the month I have before my trip the Allen County Public Library (the second largest genealogy library in the nation). And I know the preparation for that trip is going to be a critical component of making that trip a successful use of my time and money. And now I have some tools for that preparation!
  • I heard talks on using both Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.com. I have to admit that I use Ancestry more than Family Search, mostly because I find the latter’s user interface non-intuitive. But thanks to the talk by Deena Coutant (I heard her twice!) I feel I know my way around that site a bit better and I’m going to try to use it more. The talk by Ancestry’s Juliana Szucs on getting the most from Ancestry was eye-opening to me. I learned that searching within individual types of records and collection can reveal results not available with a top-level search. In other words, it’s worthwhile to dig deeper on Ancestry.
  • Cece Moore gave the opening keynote on the second day, about telling stories with DNA with anecdotes from the PBS program, “Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates,” on which she serves as the genetic genealogy consultant and researcher. The talk was really fun and inspired me to try again to understand my DNA results and reach out to potential relatives who might be helpful with my genealogy research. It’s pretty easy for my mind to click off when it comes to DNA and I had put my quest for understanding on the back burner. Listening to CeCe helped me understand how helpful the clues you get from DNA test results can be. That is an area in which I will try to dig deeper.
  • And, lastly, I really enjoyed and benefited from Lisa Louise Cooke’s talk on new features of Google and how they can help genealogists. I have to admit that I consider myself an excellent Googler. But I don’t typically use the search operators Lisa explained (and, truth be told, I rarely use Google as a search tool for my genealogy research). I was thrilled to learn how to find results in Google Books and clip them with the built-in clipper, which creates a unique, sharable URL for the clipping. Wow! I also was inspired to give Google Earth another try. I’m going to try to incorporate Google more into my research toolkit.

As you can tell, the Midwestern Roots conference was really inspiring and energizing for me. I loved that a single theme emerged for me so strongly.  I am so excited to go back to Indiana for my trip to the Allen County Public Library in a month and so grateful to have learned some tools to prepare for it. I’ll blog more about that plan soon!

Photo by Eselsmann via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Counted twice on the census

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Counted twice on the censusOver the holiday weekend I spent some time researching my 3d great grandparents on my father’s side, Henry Clay McEuen (1823-1894) and his wife Elizabeth Baker McEuen (1829-1917). They lived their lives in Kentucky.

Henry and Elizabeth had 14 children, the eldest of whom was my great great grandmother, Henrietta McEuen Adams (1847-1902). As part of checking my sources, I was looking at Source 22, the 1880 federal census entry for Henrietta and her husband George Washington Adams (1845-1938) in Rumsey, Kentucky.

The entry for George and Henrietta spanned two pages. When I was looking at the second page, I noticed that Henrietta’s parents were on that page. They were living with nine of their children, along with four grandchildren and Elizabeth’s mother–a four-generation household. I went to add that source to their record in Reunion and saw that I already had a (different) source for them for the 1880 census. I figured I’d duplicated the same source and was surprised to see it was a separate enumeration, on a different date, in a different town. In this second enumeration, the youngest five of their children were with them. The names and ages all matched. It was clear to me that it was the same family.

I did a little googling and discovered that being counted twice isn’t that unusual. The census is supposed to reflect the state of a household as of the census date (which in 1880 was 1 June). But clearly, in the case of this family, it reflected the household on the days the enumerator knocked on the door. I suspect that’s not unusual.

On the first enumeration, on 11 June 1880, in Rumsey, McLean, Kentucky, Henry is listed as 55 years old and a farmer. In the second enumeration, on 29 June 1880, in Sacramento, McLean Kentucky (10 miles away on today’s roads), Henry is listed as 56 years old and a “tobacco speculator” (or at least that’s what I think it says–let me know if you think otherwise when you look at the photo above). A quick look at Henry’s birth date revealed that he was in fact a year older–he celebrated a birthday on 28 June, the day before the second enumeration.

I’m speculating that some time between 11 June and 29 June, Henry and Elizabeth (or Betty, as she was known), packed up their five children under 20 and moved to Sacramento. They left behind the four older children who had lived with them, including Lucretia, a widow, and her four kids, along with Betty’s mother, Mahala Baker. Henrietta and George lived nearby.

I wonder what prompted the couple to move away from five of their kids and her mother. Perhaps Sacramento was a better place to be a tobacco speculator, or perhaps Henry had not bought land yet, so couldn’t call himself a farmer. I look forward to trying to dig into this a little more to see why the family might have moved.

It’s really fun to me how a single discovery like this–a family being counted twice on a census–can lead to further hypotheses and discoveries. If they’d moved in May or July, rather than June, I wouldn’t have had this level of detail to go on.

I love playing detective and I’m grateful to Henry and Betty for providing so many clues!

 

Checking my sources

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Verifying my sourcesThis year I’ve been having the hardest time figuring out what I want to focus on in my genealogy research sessions. I think part of the problem is that I’ve also had trouble finding time to research, so it’s been more sporadic. And when I do have time, then I don’t know what to work on.

A couple of years ago, I tried focusing on a different line each quarter. That was successful, but this year I’m not researching frequently enough to make that work. Last year, I was really focused on processing and transcribing my ancestors’ Civil War pension files. That was great too, but I’m wanting to mix it up a bit more these days.

I know I need to figure out what I want to focus on during my week at the Allen County Library in August, which means that I feel the need to revisit my ancestors and remind myself of my mysteries.

So I lit on a strategy that, for the moment anyway, is working well for me. (And I also came up with a strategy that’s allowing me to research more frequently–more on that in the next post.) Here’s what I’m doing:

I’m going through all my sources in the Reunion family-tree software, checking the format, and attaching an image of the source to the source entry.

I exported the list of my 300 sources as an rtf file then opened the file in Evernote. I made the type big enough to read easily, then turned it one long bullet list with checkboxes for bullets. One by one, I’m going down the list and looking at each source and at the document that goes with the source. I’m checking the usage of the source. I attach the document as a multimedia file (leaving it on my hard drive in its folder, organized by surname and individual).  I’m getting reacquainted with my ancestors. And it’s been really fun.

I’m seeing several benefits to this process:

  • I know exactly where to start when I sit down to do research.
  • I’m cleaning up some formatting issues, since I became better at source documentation over time (so I’ve been able to make entries more consistent).
  • I’m making a list of things to investigate further, which will be helpful in planning my research trip.
  • I’m finding things I missed in the source documents the first time around.
  • I’m making new discoveries as I go along.
  • I get to work on a variety of ancestors every day, which suits me these days.
  • I see tangible progress every session.
  • I can make progress in just a few minutes, which is great when I don’t have a lot of time to research.
  • I’ve found that some electronic files had not been filed correctly and I’ve been able to refile them.
  • I end up with a wonderfully organized source list.
  • It’s systematic and enjoyable. I love checking off the box when I’m finished with that source!

If I wanted to focus on the sources of a single family, Reunion makes that easy for me. (I just click on “Family” rather than “All” in the sources list.) But for me, right now, mixing up the families by checking the sources in the order in which I entered them is working out nicely.

So far, I’ve checked off 20 of my now-306 sources. (I’ve made a few discoveries in the process, so I’ve added a few sources.) I’ve been doing a little a day for the last five days or so. Clearly it’s not fast work (though it may get faster as my sourcing gets better). But it’s beneficial and enjoyable. Hooray!

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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.