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...

Generated with AI (Microsoft Bing Image Creator) ∙ January 7, 2024 at 12:54 PM Jones Family Tree: Sanford Talbert Jones and Ethelyn Stephens At the end of 2023, I had a wonderful surprise and wrote about it here: Piggy-back . Antoinette has been generous, sharing family photos and history, which really led to breakthroughs in my son-in-law Jason's tree. Researching families outside of my "own" has been enriching, and I learned so much researching the family of  Ethelyn Stephens, Jason's great-grandmother. She married Sanford Talbert Jones the first, who was a laborer for the City of Los Angeles at the end of his life. To the right is a part of a photo of their son Sanford II (in the middle) in an old fire truck, from a great article about Black firefighters in Los Angeles. [1]  Sanford Talbert Jones II and Ruby Alexander Sanford carried on his father's experience in working for LA city. He  married Ruby Alexander who was born in Louisiana, possibly in New Orlea...

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...

New Mexico Wildfire- -Silver City Sun-News Devon Noel Lee is back! The Family History Fanatics team had to flee their home to escape the terrible forest fires in New Mexico, and have recently been able to resume their informative, useful videos. Devon's first loves in genealogy are first, research, and then writing about family.  Write a Timeline Recently I watched one of her short writing videos called " Write a Family History Story in Chronological Order | FIRST DRAFT ONLY " which seems so logical! Notice the "first draft only" part of the title. Writing out a timeline can sort your thoughts and yield insights about what happened in the family, such as births happening during travel, deaths of family members close together, when and where the land purchases took place, all of which might otherwise not be noticed. You may notice holes in your research as you write, which will pause the writing while you chase down those records and complete finding context and...

When planning research in a new place, many of us have consulted the FamilySearch Research Wiki, and have collected books which cover states or regions where we find our ancestors and their friends, associates and neighbors.  On this blog   we've discussed creating a checklist  to ensure that we don't overlook useful resources to answer our research questions. Reusable locality research guide is a map to success Recently, advice to create our own locality research guides seem to be popping up everywhere, which takes the checklist concept to a whole new level. The recent   National Genealogical Society Magazine , had "Creating and Using Locality Guides as Genealogy Tools" by Jan Joyce. The article itself is available to NGS Members or from the magazine itself, but fortunately her case study and examples are available  here  for everyone. Holmes County, Indiana is shown but the principles are the same for every locality.  Challenge Accepted! Countie...

Card catalog by Reeding Lessons. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) If you ever had to write a research paper in high school or college, step one was always the "literature survey" -- finding out what had been published about your topic. Remember when that meant asking the librarian to show you where in the card catalog to look, to begin that search? Very often we skip that step now, especially when researching our own families, because we have our own personal knowledge as context. But do we really? Why Do a Survey?  For our Black Heritage of Franklin project, I've been working on families in Chester, Randolph County, Illinois, where many of the families seem to have been free people of color. After reading part of a paper about Brushy Fork IL , I got curious and searched for a more general article about Blacks in early Illinois. I began with a Wikipedia article about Chester and Randolph County, including where it is located, which is in...