Your Research Question Equals the Size of the Puzzle As usual, when trying to think of what to write about, something prompts the writer; and for me that is often what I've been recently working on. These days, I'm puzzling over my DNA matches tracing back to my third-great-grandparents, George Henry and Martha Willis McBee. Thrulines ®  at Ancestry.com has been a useful map from my ancestors to the matches.  The Map Is Not The Territory But  ThruLines®  are not "True" lines. They are created by algorithms from Ancestry user trees including our own; all trees are imperfect, including ours. The same process creates  The Theory of Family Relativity™  at MyHeritage. Neither tool  reveals all the details we might wish about living people, so they leave us with work to do. Fortunately, I began my research to understand my family and find living cousins, so I've been "building down" for many years. When DNA became a useful new record source, I was already part

  Sometimes I focus on a single person or family, and lose the larger context. A recent discussion in our Tech User Group opened my eyes to this, and shows me that our focus must remain on finding the stories of our families, and then passing along those stories so that our history lives on. SKCGS is here to help you use whatever you need to find those stories, and to help you tell them. Tree Completeness One way to begin to do this is to look at your overall tree, and one way to do that is with a fan chart. As I look at my tree, I'm a bit behind filling in some of the lines here on FamilySearch Family Tree! I need to fill in my Swedish great-grandmother's grandfather, at least. That's the big gap on the upper left. I believe I can do that soon. The gap to the upper right is in my focus family for the next few years, in Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia, aided by DNA evidence, so these women are not forgotten.  Who Were Your People? To pull back even further, who wer

Courtesy of Amethyst Studio from The Noun Project What Do You Seek? There's an old story about the cop walking his beat when he encounters an old man on his hands and knees under the street light. "What are you looking for, buddy?" The reply: "I'm looking for my car keys." Cop says, "there are no cars right close. Where did you lose them?" Reply: "I dropped them when getting out of my car, but the light is here!" Do you sometimes feel that way while you are searching for records, and finding nothing? Have you considered that Ancestry or FamilySearch might not have the records you seek?   Or that the record you wish for was never created? What's the Plan? When I began doing genealogy research, I never had a plan, didn't know one could plan research, and I'm sure I would have thought the idea of taking research time to create a plan was ridiculous!   These days, some of my research is still unplanned. After studying Research Li

courtesy Pixabay Sheer Joy of Research  Sometimes you've got the bull by the horns and rush along researching recklessly, breathlessly. That's fun! But we all know that details are missed this way and sometimes, in your hurry, you take the wrong road, pick the wrong parents, mix the records of two people with the same name. . .we've all been there!  It's fun, but there is sometimes quite a bit of cleanup to do after the rampage.   Professional Approach Professional researchers do it differently. Time is of the essence, and getting results efficiently is what creates success. So the pros will plan their work by working out a research question or a series of questions  with the client , and then begin by  doing a literature and record set survey.  Then is it time to assess what websites will yield the information needed? What repositories will need to be visited, or contacted? After the planning stage, the professional will consult the client for any fine-tuning. Focus Mo