Chapter 13

Finding Your Research Path

IN THIS CHAPTER

check Using the Helm Family Tree Research Cycle

check Taking your time

check Verifying information

Talking about the methods for working on genealogy or family history research isn’t very exciting. However, we would be doing an injustice to you if we sent you out into the jungle that is family history research without giving you some advice from the traditional world of research.

This chapter is designed to provide a research foundation that helps you spend your time as efficiently as possible. In the following pages, we look at how to develop a plan to research your ancestors and cover the phases of research. In the latter parts of the chapter, we go through some gentle reminders that can help you keep your research as relevant as possible.

Introducing the Helm Online Family Tree Research Cycle

Your question at this point is probably, what is the Helm Online Family Tree Research Cycle? All great projects start with a plan, and starting a genealogical project is no exception. A well-thought-out plan can help you make efficient use of your time and keep you focused on the goals that you’ve set for a particular research session. Now, we realize that not everyone enjoys coming up with a plan. Finding your ancestors is the fun part — not the planning. So, to help speed things along, we’ve come up with a basic process that we hope helps you make the most of your research time. We call this plan the Helm Online Family Tree Research Cycle. Most of our plan is common sense. Figure 13-1 shows the six phases of the cycle: planning, collecting, researching, consolidating, validating, and distilling.

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FIGURE 13-1: The Helm Online Family Tree Research Cycle.

Sticking with the family tree motif here, we liken the cycle to the steps you take to plant and sustain a tree:

  • Planning: The first step in planting a tree is figuring out what kind of tree you want and then finding a good place in your yard for the tree to grow. This step in the cycle is the planning phase. In genealogy, the planning phase consists of selecting a family that you know enough about to begin a search and thinking about the resources that can provide the information that you’re looking for.
  • Collecting: After you plan for the tree, you go to a nursery and pick a suitable sapling and other necessary materials to ensure that the tree’s roots take hold. The second phase of the cycle, collecting, is the same — you collect information on the family that you’re researching by conducting interviews in person, on the phone, or through email, and by finding documents in attics, basements, and other home-front repositories.
  • Researching: The next step is to actually plant the tree. You dig a hole, place the tree in it, and then cover the roots. Similarly, you spend the researching phase of the cycle digging for clues, finding information that can support your family tree, and obtaining documentation. You can use traditional and technological tools to dig — tools such as libraries, courthouses, your computer, and the web.
  • Consolidating: You planted the tree and covered its roots. However, to make sure that the tree grows, you put mulch around it and provide the nourishment that the tree needs to survive. The consolidating phase of the cycle is similar in that you take information you find and place it into your computer-based genealogical database or your filing system. These systems protect your findings by keeping them in a centralized location and provide an environment in which you can see the fruits of your labor.
  • Validating: To ensure that you’re providing your tree with all the nutrition and care that it needs, you might pick up a book or watch a gardening show to confirm that your actions will nurture the tree. The validating phase in genealogy allows you to do the same with your research. By using additional research tools and by finding multiple sources, you can feel more confident that your discoveries are placing your research on the right track.
  • Distilling: After your tree takes root and begins to grow, you need to prune the old growth, allowing new growth to appear. Similarly, the distilling phase is where you use your computer-based genealogical database to generate reports showing the current state of your research. You can use these reports to prune from your database those individuals you’ve proven don’t fit into your family lines — and perhaps find room for new genealogical growth by finding clues to other lines with which you want to follow up.

We think that using our research model makes looking for genealogical information a lot easier and more fulfilling. However, this model is merely a guide. Feel free to use whatever methods work best for you — as long as those methods make it possible for someone else to verify your research (through sources you cite and so on).

Planning your research

Your computer puts the world at your fingertips. Discovering all the wonderful online resources that exist makes you feel like a kid in a candy store. You click around from site to site with wide eyes, amazed by what you see, tempted to record everything for your genealogy — whether it relates to one of your family lines or not.

Because of the immense wealth of information available to you, putting together a research plan before going online is very important — it can save you a lot of time and frustration by keeping you focused. Millions of pages with genealogical content exist on the Internet. If you don’t have a good idea of exactly what you’re looking for to fill in the blanks in your family history, you can get lost online. Getting lost is even easier when you see a name that looks familiar and start following its links, only to discover hours later (when you finally get around to pulling out the notes you already had) that you’ve been tracking the wrong person and family line.

Now that we’ve convinced you that you need a research plan (at least we hope we’ve convinced you), you’re probably wondering exactly what a research plan is. Basically, a research plan is a commonsense approach to looking for information about your ancestors online. A research plan entails knowing what you’re looking for and what your priorities are for finding information.

If you’re the kind of person who likes detailed organization (such as lists and steps), you can map out your research plan in a spreadsheet or word processor on your computer, write it on paper, or use a genealogical software tool. If you’re the kind of person who knows exactly what you want and need at all times, and you have an excellent memory of where you leave off when doing projects, your research plan can exist solely in your mind. In other words, your research plan can be as formal or informal as you like — as long as it helps you plot what you’re looking for.

For example, say that you’re interested in finding some information on your great-grandmother. Here are some steps you can take to form a research plan:

  1. Write down what you already know about the person you want to research — in this case, your great-grandmother.

    Include details such as the dates and places of birth, marriage, and death; spouse’s name; children’s names; and any other details you think may help you distinguish your ancestor from other individuals. Of course, it’s possible that all you know at this time is Great-grandma’s name.

  2. Survey a comprehensive genealogical index to get an overview of what’s available.

    Visit a site such as Linkpendium (www.linkpendium.com) to browse for information by name and location. Using Great-grandma’s name and the names of some of the locations where she lived will allow you to see what kinds of resources are available. (Chapter 7 goes into more detail about online tips and searching for this type of information.) Make sure that you make a list of the sites that you find in a word processor document, in a spreadsheet, or on a piece of paper; bookmark them on your web browser; or record them in your genealogical application. Also, given that websites come and go frequently, you may want to consider downloading the web page for future offline browsing. Most web browsers allow you to download a web page by selecting Save As from the File menu at the top, and then providing the path to the file where you want to save a copy.

  3. Prioritize the resources that you want to use.

    Browsing a comprehensive genealogical index may turn up several types of resources, such as sites featuring digitized copies of original records, transcriptions of records, online genealogy databases, or an online message board with many posts about people with the same last name. We recommend that you prioritize which resources you plan to use first. You may want to visit a website that contains specific information on your grandmother’s family first — rather than spending a lot of time on a website that just contains generic information on her surname. You may also want to visit a site with digitized original records first and leave a site with transcribed records or a database for later use.

  4. Schedule time to use the various resources that you identify.

    Family history is truly a lifelong pursuit — you can’t download every bit of information and documentation that you need all at once. Because researching your genealogy requires time and effort, we recommend that you schedule time to work on specific parts of your research. If you have a particular evening open every week, you can pencil in a research night on your calendar, setting aside 15–30 minutes at the beginning to review what you have and assess your goals, then spending a couple of hours researching, and ending your evening with another 15–30 minutes of review in which you organize what you found.

Here are a few resources that can help you sharpen your planning skills:

Collecting useful information

After you generate a research plan (see the preceding section), you may need to fill in a few details such as dates and locations of births, marriages, and deaths. You can collect this information by interviewing family members and by looking through family documents and photographs. (See Chapter 2 for tips on interviewing and using family documents and photographs.) You may also need to look up a few places in an atlas or a gazetteer (a geographical dictionary) if you aren’t sure of certain locations. (Chapter 6 provides more information on online gazetteers.)

It’s useful to jot down peripheral information such as the names of siblings, other family members, and the names of neighbors, if they’re available. This extra information might be enough to determine whether the record you’re looking at pertains to your ancestor. For example, if you’re looking for a pension record for your ancestor, and you run across several pension records for people with the same name, then knowing the names of others with ties to your ancestor can help you determine which of the pension records is the right one. One detail to help confirm that the record relates to your ancestor may be the name of a witness. Sometimes the applicant would use neighbors or extended family members as witnesses. Recognizing the name of the witness might help speed up your search.

For a list of things that may be useful to collect, see Chapter 2. In the meantime, here are a few online resources that can help you get started with your family history:

Researching: Through the brick wall and beyond

A time will undoubtedly come when you run into what genealogists affectionately call the brick wall syndrome — when you think you’ve exhausted every possible way of finding an ancestor. The most important thing you can do is to keep the faith — don’t give up!

Websites are known to change frequently (especially as more records are digitized, indexed, and placed online). Although you may not find exactly what you need today, you may find it next week at a site you’ve visited several times before or at a new site altogether. The lesson here is to check back at sites that you’ve visited before.

Another way to get past the brick wall is to ask for help. Don’t be afraid to post a message on a mailing list or email other researchers you’ve corresponded with in the past to see whether they have answers or suggestions for finding answers. Also, you may be able to use the expertise of members of a genealogical or historical society who can point you to specific resources that you may not have known existed. We talk more about genealogical and historical societies in Chapter 6.

Fortunately, you can also find suggestions posted online on how to get through that brick wall when you run up against it. Check out these sites:

Consolidating information in a database

After you get rolling on your research, you often find so much information that it feels like you don’t have enough time to put it all into your genealogical application.

A genealogical application is a software program or online application that allows you to enter, organize, store, and use all sorts of genealogical information on your computer. You can find more information on using a genealogical application in Chapter 1.

When possible, try to set aside some time to update your database with information you recently gathered. This process of putting your information together in one central place, which we call consolidating, helps you gain a perspective on the work that you’ve completed and provides a place for you to store all those nuggets you’ll need when you begin researching again. By storing your information in a database, you can always refer to it for a quick answer the next time you try to remember something specific, such as where you found a reference to a marriage certificate for your great-great-grandparents, or where your great-grandfather lived during a particular time frame. Placing your information in a genealogical database has a bonus — you can take your research with you when you travel. You can carry your database on your laptop’s hard drive, or you can even find smartphone and tablet applications that can display the contents of genealogical databases.

Validating your findings

After discovering information on your ancestor, it’s critical that you take the time to validate your findings. Just because something is printed online doesn’t mean that it’s correct. Even primary sources can contain incorrect data, either because of a clerical error or because the individual who was the source of the record intentionally misled the recorder. For example, you’ve probably heard stories of underage relatives who lied about their age to enlist in the army. So, you might find that the birthdate in a recruitment record is different than the birthdate in a pension record. To ensure that you have the best evidence possible, we recommend that you find three sources to triangulate any key piece of information on your ancestor. We understand that this isn’t always possible, but it is a good practice to validate any evidence that you can find.

Beyond just finding additional records to validate ancestry, we also recommend using other available tools, such as DNA testing, to validate records. Non-paternal events did happen in the past and it’s possible that the father listed on a birth record was not the biological father. DNA testing can also be used when there is not enough evidence to be certain about a particular conclusion but there is some circumstantial evidence that you would like to test. For example, Matthew’s progenitor, George Helm, was located in the same county at the same time as another Helm family. A few authors asserted that George may have been a disowned son of the family. However, after DNA testing several individuals, including Matthew and some descendants from that Helm family, it’s clear that those assertions were not true. The two families are in different haplogroups, which allows us to conclude that they were definitely two different families with the same surname. For more on DNA testing, see Chapter 10.

For more on validating your research, check out the following sites:

Distilling the information that you gather

The final step in the cycle is distilling the information that you gather into a report, a chart, an organized database, or a detailed research log that you can use to find additional genealogical leads. Frequently, you can complete the distillation process by producing a report from your genealogical application. Most genealogical applications allow you to generate reports in a variety of formats. For example, you can pull up a pedigree chart (a chart showing a primary person with lines representing the relationships to his or her parents, then lines connecting them to their parents, and so on) or an outline of descendants from information that you entered in the database about each ancestor. You can use these reports to see what holes still exist in your research, and you can add these missing pieces to the planning phase for your next research effort — starting the entire cycle over.

Another advantage to genealogical reports is having the information readily available so that you can toggle back to look at the report while researching online, which can help you stay focused. (Toggling is flipping back and forth between open programs on your computer. For example, in Windows, you press Alt+Tab to toggle, or you can click the appropriate item on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. On a Macintosh, you can use ⌘  +Tab or the Application Switcher in the upper-right corner of the screen.) If you prefer, printing copies of the reports and keeping them next to the computer while you’re researching online serves the same purpose.

Too Many Ancestor Irons in the Research Fire

When you begin your research, take your time and don’t get in a big hurry. Keep things simple and look for one piece of information at a time. If you try to do too much too fast, you risk getting confused, having no online success, and getting frustrated with online research. This result isn’t encouraging and certainly doesn’t make you feel like jumping back into your research, which would be a shame because you can find a lot of valuable information and research help online.

tip A good strategy is to focus on one person or immediate family unit at a time. With the advances in search technology on genealogical sites, it’s often tempting to conduct a search to find information on a variety of family members in a single search. However, try to resist jumping from one family member to another. Although you can accumulate records on several individuals, you might miss opportunities to systematically find records on your ancestor.

Verifying Your Information

A piece of advice for you when you’re researching:

remember Don’t believe everything you read.

Well, actually, a genealogy purist might say, “Don’t believe anything you read.” Either way, the point is the same: Always verify any information that you find online — or, for that matter, in print — with primary records. (For more on primary records, see Chapter 2.) If you can’t prove it through a vital record, census record, or some other authoritative record, the information simply may not be as valuable as you think. However, don’t discount something just because you can’t immediately prove it. You might want to hold on to the information and continue to try to prove or disprove it with a primary document. At some time in the future, you may run across a record that does indeed prove the accuracy of the information; in the meantime, it might give you some leads for where to look for more about that person.

You’ve probably seen courtroom dramas on television where the lawyer must prove his case before a jury. In family history, researchers go through a similar process to prove that a particular event occurred in the lives of their ancestors. At times, you won’t be able to find a record that verifies that your ancestor was born on a certain date. Perhaps the birth record was destroyed in a courthouse fire or the birth was never properly recorded. Or worse yet, you may find two records that contain conflicting information about the same event.

So, how do genealogists and family historians know when they have sufficiently proved something? Well, for the longest time, no published guidelines existed on what constituted sufficient proof. To assist professional genealogists figure out the appropriate level of proof for their clients, the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG) created the Genealogical Proof Standard as part of the BCG Genealogical Standards Manual (published in 2000 by Ancestry).

The Genealogical Proof Standard contains five steps. If these five steps are completed, sufficient proof exists for a professional genealogist to create a research report stating that a certain event happened. We paraphrase the steps a bit to make them a little easier to understand:

  1. Conduct a reasonably exhaustive search for all information related to a particular event.
  2. Include a complete and accurate citation of the information that you use for your research.
  3. Analyze the quality of the information. (For example, is the information from a primary source or is it from a reliable source?)
  4. Resolve conflicts between two sources of information (such as two resources stating two different birth dates for the same person).
  5. Arrive at a sound conclusion based on the information related to an event.

Although these steps were established for professional genealogists, they are good steps for you to follow to make sure that any person reading your research can follow your conclusions. Following these steps does not ensure that your conclusions are accurate 100 percent of the time. You always have the chance that a new piece of evidence will surface that may disprove your conclusions.

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