Revisit Old Research   White Goose Flying - Royalty free from pickpic.com Why Rake Up Old Research?  There are lots of reasons to revisit old research. Perhaps: New DNA match New record  Questions from connections Or maybe questions you ask yourself based on new education, more experience and newly-found connections. No matter the reason, I have found that revisiting is more useful than a "do over. " We all learn as we gain experience, both in methodology and as we deepen our understanding of our families and their stories, migrations, and the places where they lived.  DNA Tools Give a Reason for a Fresh Look Recently I asked my cousin to generate a DNA cluster report for my McBee uncle, because he is one generation closer to our ancestors than any of us cousins are. If you have never seen an autocluster, see one here:  https://education.myheritage.com/article/autoclusters-for-dna-matches/ . It is fun to see the report take shape, and the groups are very useful. I share DNA w

Best Reason to Throw a Party The best excuse to clean your house , I once read, is to ready it for a party . While cleaning house, I thought, is the same true about "writing it up"? Writing the stories of our ancestors and relatives is the culmination of our work. When we know that our place is welcoming to guests, we feel free to celebrate; telling stories of the past unlocks the lives of our families to all who hear them. Writing the stories is t he best excuse to research. Write while researching so that that your thoughts have somewhere to go‒directly into the notes, before they evaporate. Writing soothes the itch in the brain instead of sending us down rabbit holes. Now is a great time to get started writing, in preparation for Family History Month in October . Courtesy of the National Genealogical Society Writing tests our research and thinking It is while writing that holes in the story are exposed, inconsistencies glare, and leaps of logic fall flat. If our analysis

Have you been spoiled by good fortune? Consider Joining Our New Study Group! Courtesy andreas_fischler; Creative Commons 2.0 Sometimes it is really easy to find records on the big genealogy sites, the hints make sense, and we begin to think that research is easy. So easy, that we may forget what to do when the ripe fruit isn't hanging easily in reach. That's when a study group would come in handy ,  to remind us of basic principles of research. Or for beginners on the family history journey to learn those habits and practices from the very best, right at the start. Recent Example I had given up with Seth Willis of Harrison County, Missouri, an ancestor of one of my McBee uncle's DNA matches, until I thought about what to focus on for the new Research Study Group, beginning Wednesday, 14 August . Seth was born early enough that there are no records of parentage, and his probable father's obituary does not mention him. So I created a timeline of facts and sources to se

Free public domain CC0 image, courtesy RawPixel Crack the Nut, or First Things First What is your  greatest challenge when writing up your research work? For me, it was always writing citations . Key step for me to resolving this was to change my habits and make writing the citation the first thing I do, right in the planning stage. Lead with a Citation How does that make sense, when I've not even found the source I'm looking for? One of the first steps in a research project is planning; narrowing the topic (research question), gathering the context (history and locality), then ranking the possible sources of the needed information by ease of access, reliability, accessibility, cost, and chance of success in answering the question. In the planning stage, we have identified the databases or record groups we want to consult, so this is the right time to craft a citation. All the information we need, except for the specific records you will find is available, so Just Do It Now. A

Citation Needed:March for Science in Washington, DC by Adam Fagen on Flickr Citations! So necessary to our work, and so dreaded. We all know we will thank ourselves later if we write them, but somehow..... don't.  Why do we need them? Of course we want to keep track of what and where we found the source of the information we're using in our research and writing. That is our duty to ourselves.  However, to me, the most important aspect of writing citations is analysis . Analysis What is this record? Who created it, when and where, and who collected and kept it safe? Who was the informant? Did that person have any reason to give less than accurate information?  What am I looking at? Is it a digital copy, digital microfilm, in color, or black and white? Or a paper record from the household or an repository? Is there more to the record? Many cards, for instance, have information on both front and back. Probate files can be many--even hundreds--of pages long. Was that probate page 

  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 PublicDomainImages.net "Car Burning Rubber" Deadlines I used to dread writing reports, from grade school on. Deadlines caused dread, and there was no pleasure (or learning) from scrabbling together all the sources into something readable. When I began doing genealogy research, writing reports of my findings never entered my mind! Not even when I found massive help from various books and articles. I never saw myself then as a contributor to the body of knowledge; only as a consumer.  From Consumer to Contributor https://www.wikitree.com/ Two things changed my viewpoint. The first was finding Wikitree, where I took responsibility for the linked profiles for many of the family members I had found through my years of research. The Wikitree focus on sourcing, collaboration and narrative, not just a bare skein of facts, began to change that "consumer" stance, into becoming a contributor.  Focus and Collaboration The other event that taught me how to contribute be

DNA Dot Reform Last night I removed all my AncestryDNA ®  dots.  And then, started over. This was years of work removed, but after watching Diahan Southard's " The 5 Steps to Organizing Your DNA in 2023 ," I had to do it.  After studying Research Like A Pro , I've reformed my research practices, and heading into Research Like a Pro With DNA , I want to do that with DNA too, because it is a  really valuable record source. I realized I had been using the dots only as labels, not as filters which Southard's simple how-to enables. I'm using Ancestry as an example; the techniques will work elsewhere of course. Dot Groups as Filters Once the dots were gone, I created four groups, one for each of my great grandparent couples. Here is the view of the near end of my pedigree. I've blurred all but my great-greats, and boxed each couple to show what Southard proposes: Valorie's great-grandparent couples So my first four groups are: Cowan-McPherson, Schell-Anders

A timeline gets you where you want to go! We've discussed timelines many times here on the blog. Here is one 2-year-old example: The Timeline: Your Guide Through the Twists and Turns of Research . In the latest SKCGS Study Group, working our way through "Research Like A Pro," by Diana Elder, AG with Nicole Dyer. The second chapter is all about how to use a timeline to analyze sources and likely evidence found in those sources.   But how exactly do you create one? And is one way better than another? Elder advocates for a spreadsheet or relational database. While most of us have not yet tried Airtable , the relational database she uses now, I tried creating the spreadsheet from the information I had been collecting in a timeline using Google Sheets. While it was useful as a place to collect the direct links to record images and a good prompt to create source citations, I didn't find it useful to reason out what was happening behind the records.  Here is a snippet of tha