Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Follow-up notebooks to the rescue!

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I’ve been using follow-up notebooks in Evernote for years to keep track of clues that I come across so that I don’t get distracted from my current research question. I have follow-up notebooks by Surname in my Evernote Genealogy stack. I also have a notebooks called Library Look Ups, where I paste links to FamilySearch documents that must be accessed from the Family History Library or one of its affiliates.

Two days ago, I met up with my genealogy buddy, Vickie, at the St. Louis County Library Headquarters’ Genealogy and History Library. The headquarters is closing tomorrow for more than year for renovation. While some of the genealogy collection is moving to another branch starting July 5, the resources won’t be as abundant.

Vickie and I thought it would be a good idea to pay one last visit while we could. We scheduled it a few weeks ago, before my trip to Walla Walla. Because of family and work obligations, I just haven’t had time to do genealogy research or even prepare as I normally would for this library trip.

So I just showed up with my computer at the library, with no plan or research question. But, thanks to my follow-up and library look-up notebooks in Evernote, I actually had a productive time! I first looked up everything in the library look-up notebook and then turned my attention to the follow-up notebooks by surname. That kept me busy the whole time I was there. And it got me away from the “what should I work on?” question that sometimes bedevils me.

I heartily recommend having a spot to record look-ups and follow-ups so you easily start researching when the opportunity arises.

1950 Census clue: Sheet 71 and up

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I spent the day with the 1950 U.S. Census on April 1, as anticipated, and I was bleary eyed (and brain dead) by afternoon. But I had a great time. When I found my teenage mother (who passed away in 2015) on the census living with her parents and little brother, I got goose bumps.

I had done a pretty good job of finding enumeration districts (EDs) in advance, which was good, since the search function worked for just one of my people. I had the joy of finding my grandparents when I wasn’t looking for them. (I was looking for my aunt, who was married and in her own home by then and just stumbled upon my grandparents.)

On April 1, I found father (in his fraternity house at Whitman College), my mother living with her parents and grandmother, my paternal grandparents, and two sets of great grandparents. I didn’t find my aunt (my father’s sister, who is still living) though I browsed the EDs I thought she might be living in page by painstaking page. And I also searched in vain for my father’s paternal grandmother. (I’m determined to keep looking!) I’ve processed the documents I found, but I haven’t had a chance to do much more looking. I’m excited to get back to it.

If you’re like me, you’ve seen a lot of “No One At Home” entries on the pages you were looking at. I wanted to share a tip I learned only after I had done all that browsing. For every enumeration district, no matter how many sheets it has, the names of those folks who were re-canvassed after not being at home starts on Sheet 71. An ED might have 30 pages to browse, but it might skip from sheet 26 to sheet 71. So if you find your person’s address and it says No One At Home, I suggest you skip to sheet 71 (and beyond) to if they’re there. (And take comfort in knowing that sheets 26 to 70 in this example aren’t missing.)

I’m going to go back to some of the EDs I browsed looking for my aunt and great grandmother and make sure I pay especially close attention to Sheet 71 and up. I was pretty bleary eyed by the last pages of any ED and I’m hopeful perhaps I just missed them.

If you’d like to read more detail about how enumerators were instructed to handle No One At Home, check out this detailed blog post from the History Hub, the National Archives’ crowdsourced platform: 1950 Census: Enumerated Out-of-Order – “Callbacks” and Others on Page 71 and Up.

Happy hunting!

The bright side of the backlog

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I often post here about having a backlog of documents that I need to deal with. When I get on a roll, I tend to download documents willy nilly, rather than pausing to process each one before downloading another. I do always rename the file as soon as I download it and put it in my Surnames folder. That list of unprocessed documents used to stress me out or at the very least make me feel like a bad genealogist.

Before I focused on my backlog during the January 30 x 30 challenge, I had 88 documents to process! (By process, I mean extracting facts from the document, entering them into my database on Reunion and creating a source citation that is used for each fact.)

By the end of the January 30 x 30 challenge (well, actually by the first week in February), my backlog was gone. And since then I’ve been focusing on watching RootsTech classes and prepping for the 1950 census release, so I haven’t been adding to the backlog since then.

It felt great to clear out the backlog. But I realized something that surprised me: I kind of miss my backlog. What? Here’s the bright side to having a letting documents pile up. When I have a backlog, I always have a mini-genealogy project at the ready. I just pick a document and process it. (I actually enjoying processing documents, so it’s not a hardship.) I don’t have to figure out what/who I want to research in a given session.

Now that I have no backlog, I have to get focused on some research questions. Weirdly, I feel a little like I’m starting from scratch.

So here’s what I decided today: I’m going to allow myself to build a backlog of up to ten documents without feeling guilty about it. But when I hit ten, I will stop looking for more and start processing what I have. I’m calling it the Rule of Ten. I imagine there will be times when I have more than ten in a given session. But I will whittle it down to below ten in the next one.

This feels really good to me and I can’t wait to see if it works out well!

Quick Tip #33: Always check the document image

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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 couple of weeks on a small topic that pops into my head. This one could be really helpful if it’s not already your practice!

Always check the document image

If you’re doing research online and locate a document that pertains to your ancestor, you usually have the opportunity to click on a link that shows you the (typewritten) indexed information. And you also have the opportunity to click to see an image of the document itself. Please take the opportunity to look at the image.

Why look at the document image? Here’s a great reason: Not every bit of information is necessarily indexed, so you may glean information from looking at the document that you would have missed had you relied on the index. Another reason is that the document may not be indexed correctly, something you might be able to tell by looking at the document image.

Plus, in my opinion it’s fun to look at old handwritten documents. I take every opportunity I can!

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash