Follow through

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In tennis lessons years ago, the instructor kept stressing "follow through" which meant that the stroke was not finished once I hit the ball, but only when my momentum was used to set up the return. I learned the same thing when learning to shoot a firearm—steady, aim, fire, follow through. 

It has taken years to figure out that follow through is important in research, for the same reason. 

In order to get around my stubborn streak, I began the research log for a new project by identifying and prioritizing the most useful databases, then creating a citation for each database before digging into the searches. Getting the "dirty work" out of the way first made it easier to gather the other details, such as date consulted, search terms used, FANs identified, and analysis of any useful records found—even when there were no or negative results. Momentum is powerful! Follow through results in more effective research and saves a great deal of time. A FamilyHistoryFanatics post says, "genealogist Tom Jones famously said: 'The first 15 years of my work in genealogy, I didn’t have any clue what I was doing. The next 20 years, I spent fixing all my mistakes.'" While all of us create mistakes in our trees, attention to every detail given us in every record we find, will cut that error rate closer to zero.

Research Reports

I have not always done this, but I am trying to "up my game" this year by creating a research report for 52 ancestors. I've mostly finished the report for my father, and while some of the timeline was painful to relive and remember, I'm happy to have done it. From now on, I'm going to start a research report for each person under study, which should help when the research gets interrupted.

In 2021, Barbara Mattoon wrote THERE’S A CHECKLIST FOR THAT about her method of follow-through. 

For those who rebel against citations, see Why do I need citations? I don't want to publish (and other excuses)

If you have not yet fallen in love with timelines, read The Timeline: Your Guide Through the Twists and Turns of Research and Timelines: The Key to Source Analysis and get far more out of the records you have already found, and more ideas about where to look next. 


Ted Cowan as a toddler


Templates

Templates save time and help you follow through by including all the items you want to include in your plan or report. My research report template includes a timeline, and finishing my daddy's timeline brought up lots of emotion. If you want to jumpstart a timeline, copy/paste the one from the person's Ancestry or FamilySearch Family Tree profile, or one that your genealogy software produces for you. As you go through it and cite sources, it will bring ideas to mind of what's missing and where else you could look. For instance, to get rough dates of my father's employment at various companies, I will look in city directories, although dates will be rough. The important part of the timeline is the sequence of events and what else was happening at the time.

I particularly noticed that Pearl Harbor was attacked when my dad was 15 and a freshman in high school (Garfield High in Seattle). So during his high school years he would have been surrounded by news of his older classmates going to war, and perhaps being killed. He worked one summer as an orderly at Doctor's Hospital. He registered for the draft on his birthday in August 1944, in person, and was inducted into the Army 11 November 1944, which happened to have been my mom's birthday! I don't believe that they had met yet, though. Before making his timeline I had never noticed this sequence and those dates.

I still want to find out when he was shipped out, and when he served in various battles. It is possible that searching the local Seattle newspapers might tell me more, or I will have to wait on NARA records for more clues. If only I had pinned down that information when he was able to tell me! 

Ted Cowan about 1944


We've written before about creating a research plan, in What Are You Looking For? and creating your own locality guides in Crack the Nut.The FamilySearch Wiki provides an excellent outline for a locality guide in each new place where you are commencing research. Over time, you will learn about new repositories and databases, so your guide will grow ever more valuable as you continue to refine it. I have found that once I got over my resistance to creating and using these tools, they have become invaluable. 

Lately I've been digging into less popular, sometimes difficult-to-use record sets, such as tax lists, probate files, court and land records. Fortunately, FamilySearch has begun an amazing effort to make them less difficult by using AI to index them, giving us Full Text Search, which we wrote about in March 2024: Looking for a Needle in a Haystack? GAME CHANGER at FamilySearch. If you have not yet tried it out, please do. This new way to find our ancestors, their relatives, friends, neighbors and other associates will supercharge your enthusiasm and your research. 

Land Records Follow Through

And if you want to follow through on the land records you have found, attend our Platting Metes and Bounds workshop! The SKCGS website says, "We'll be following the step-by-step from the book "Land & Property Research In the United States" by E. Wade Hone, copyright 1997, Ancestry Inc. 

"Be sure to bring some land descriptions from deeds in "state land" states. You need only a few tools: graph paper, pencils, a short ruler (metric is best), and protractor. There will be a handout for reference. " Click to register. Handout is here.
 
 

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Send your stories to m.strickland@skcgs.org








Valorie Zimmerman

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