"Hopscotching" might not even be a proper verb. For those of you who have forgotten what hopscotch is: all it takes is a stick or piece of chalk to draw a pattern in the dirt or sidewalk. Then you hop through the pattern. Google says: "The goal of hopscotch is to be the first player to successfully hop and jump across the hopscotch board (1-10 squares"—and then a bunch of rules.  "Hope & Megan" CC BY-NC 2.0 The picture above is closer to what I recall. I remember my kids playing it on the driveway. Recently I've been doing something similar in my Ancestry.com® online trees, using "Pro Tools" which costs me $10 per month. Besides the excellent capacity to see the DNA matches of my matches, Pro Tools can also sort their matches, which often gives me wonderful clues about where they fit into my tree.  Sometimes I just want work that requires less brain power and also improves the quality of my tree. For various reasons, I recently had to rec...

[Valorie] In our research, we're always seeking to establish identity, relationships, locality, occupations, and most of all, to understand the lives of our forebears. WHO includes everyone, not just our "direct" ancestors , but their families, friends, enemies, neighbors, fellow congregants and club members, colleagues, competitors, fellow travelers and "kin," however they defined that. We know where to find them—census (including agriculture and manufacturing schedules), tax lists, newspaper articles, city directories, club rosters, church records, family photos, scrapbooks, county histories and so on. Critical, specific information was the plot of land where they made a living, alongside neighbors and relatives.   Where? MAPS How about maps as a tool to help ? In preparation for today's workshop on platting , I watched a very old Legacy webinar by Mark Lowe of Kentucky and Tennessee, about how to use the plats to learn more about our ancestors than I thou...

  Find the Needed Evidence The first element of the Genealogical Proof Standard is reasonably exhaustive research. [1] I have been pondering this statement since I realized that genealogy is more than a hobby; it is a discipline.  The Genealogy Standards Manual does not provide much help.  It simply says, “emphasizing original records providing participants’ information—for all evidence that might answer a genealogist’s question about identity, relationship, event, or situation.” [2] The Glossary in the Standards Manual does provide more guidance: “. . .research thorough enough to meet five criteria: (a) yield at least two sources of independent information items agreeing directly or indirectly on a research question’s answer, (b) cover sources competent genealogists would examine to answer the same research question, (c) provide at least some primary information and direct, indirect, or negative evidence from at least one original record, (d) replace, where ...