WTA volunteers building trail. Used with permission. While researching, all of us find people in records,  known and unknown, and would like to easily add them to our tree where we can find and add more records, properly place them in their family, and judge whether or not the family is properly placed.  This post will illustrate some ways to do that, using examples from my Ancestry.com online tree. Similar techniques can be used on other platforms.  Sometimes when you find a new person, it's quite easy to add each of the family members from a census record, even before the 1880, where relationships are not noted. When you experience that ease,  thank whoever blazed that path for you. In this post, I'll demonstrate how to mark the path yourself so that future  family researchers can more accurately add all the family members in a record. What Ancestry labels "Record" is actually a linked household index. An example is below. First, add your mystery person to yo...

Great Blue Heron in the Weeds at a lake in SE Kansas M. L. Haen, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons I recently found a legal suit while researching more distant Booth relatives, where some members of the family were suing other relatives. A bit more work found that often the defendants were their own siblings! Transcribing the lists of names was both tedious and disturbing, while thinking what happened? Why were they doing this? While working through the first few transcription drafts, fixing spellings, adding in missing names, and double-checking numerous land descriptions, it reminded me of something similar found years ago. Fortunately there was an email about it to our Groups.io about that earlier case, with a transcription!  Re-reading it was good luck: this notice stated, " the object and general nature of which is to try and determine the ti tle to said land as between the parties, plaintiff and defendan t," whi...

  The Winged Victory of Samothrace, Louvre Museum. photo by Carole Raddato:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0 Are you a sculptor, or a basket weaver?  Creating a work of art out of a block of marble is very different from gathering materials and then weaving them together into a basket. Humans have done such things since before recorded history, but rarely are such works created by the same person. We are all different, and so we will all approach our family history-keeping in different ways. And maybe you are an artist, quilter, painter, creator of montages. Do you find bliss in marrying your love of family history with your art? Do you love listening to stories? Capture them! We are not all natural writers, and not everyone wants to dig into dusty archives or spend hours researching online. What are your strengths, your natural bent, hobbies, and pastimes? Also, the best interviewers are good listeners . Interviews published here in the SKCGS Blog have bee...