Researching

Research is so underrated. All your successful and even a large portion of your pre-published writers believe in research. It's a sure bet that writers who refuse to do any research will remain unpublished.

My concern today is about genealogy and all the research required when one decides they want to trace their roots.

The first step is to start with yourself. You should know who you are, when you were born, and where you were born. Then add the information about your parents. If you know as a fact that your mother was born in a certain town or township in a state or country, then you can find the county. When I first started my research I knew the date, month, year and state where my mother was born. I was pretty I knew the county, but I also knew my maternal grandparents had a period of time in their lives when they moved around, so I wasn't positive when they entered that phase of their life. That meant when I entered my mothers information, I entered her full date of birth and the state she was born in. That was it. I wasn't 100% sure about the township and county, so I left that information out.

As a rule when it comes to genealogy, missing information is better than wrong information. When it came to my dad, I knew the date, county and state, but it took a little thinking to remember the township. Once I remember what chunk of land he was born on, I had the township. The reason the township took some thought was my dad was born on one side of the road, the other side of the road, where his father's dad lived is a different township. Until I sat down and thought about what I knew, I left the township information out of his entry.

Less is more, as long as what you have is correct.

Probably by the time you reach your grandparents you'll have to start doing some research. You might remember what month and even what month and day of the month when your grandparents were born, but most of us don't remember the year. In the case of my paternal grandfather, I remembered the year, but not the month or day. He was born in 1899 and for some reason that alway stuck with me. But I had to do some digging to find the month and day. Usually if you can find their obituary you'll have not only their date and place of birth and death, but also the names of their parents, siblings, children (in the case of large families where several have moved away), etc. And in some cases you'll find out that Aunt Tute's real name was Alice May. In the case of my family, Aunt Tute was not my grandfather's sibling, but my great grandfather's sister.

The idea is still the same though, you'll learn things in the obituaries about your family that you didn't know. As a rule, since family members who were there at the time of your ancestors death are the ones who wrote the obituary, the information is fairly accurate. Not always, but usually it's fairly accurate. Most obituaries are written after the person has died, so the family is grieving at the same time they're attempting to write a condensed accounting of that person's life. That combination means there will be some errors, but usually the information is close enough that a little digging will clear up any misinformation pretty quickly.

Sometimes dates are changed in the obituary due to typos or to hide a family scandal. For whichever reason, my great, great grandmother married my great, great grandfather on 5 Apr 1857. In her obituary it states they were married on 14 Apr 1856. Their first son was born 22 May 1857. Was the error due to typos? Or an attempt to hide the fact their first child was born six weeks after their marriage? Does it really matter? After all, we now have a time frame of when they married so we can go search for a marriage record.

The mate to research is common sense. Just as each of us has a mother and father, even if we never knew them, good genealogy requires research AND common sense.

If Mary Jane Smith was born in 1800 and died in 1822, then she could not have married David Jones in 1832. It's a different Mary Jane Smith who married your great, great, great, great uncle David Smith. Use your head. When you place it in your family tree as a fact that Mary Jane Smith, b. 1800 d. 1822 married David Jones in 1832, it makes you look stupid, lazy and pathetic. And she sure as hell wasn't the Mary Jane Smith who gave birth to all those children born between the years of 1833-1855.

Entries like the above make the rest of your family tree meaningless to real genealogist. It makes you a shadetree genealogist. Unreliable and honestly, an embarrassment to your family.

There are so many records that are digitized now days. Sloppy genealogy isn't excusable. One can do a tremendous amount of research with their computers sitting in an easy chair, munching on pretzels. When you're sloppy, your family members will wonder if you weren't sipping beer at the same time you decided this Mary Jane Smith was the only option out of all the Mary Jane Smith's to have married David Jones.

The other downside of what happens when we see lazy/shadetree genealogy, those of us who spend hours researching, using common sense and everything at our disposal to connect the dots of one generation to the next start hiding our detailed research from the shadetree genealogist. We don't want our detailed, documented work stolen and twisted to fit the shadetrees version that they refuse to back up with proof.

Where does one start? A good free place to start is Family Search. I will look at some of the family trees there, but I don't just grab the lineage information and accept it as the truth. I've found a lot of mistakes there, too. But they have a lot of records there that you can either print out or download to your computer that are accurate. When possible, click on the actual scanned image (they are not always available). I've found mistakes from when they are indexed, too. All of these are indexed by humans and humans by their very nature make mistakes.

If tracing your roots is something you think you really want to spend a lot of time and energy doing, then get a subscription to Ancestry.

You can have a public or private tree on Ancestry.com. I have one of each. You can add documents from within Ancestry to your tree.

Personally, I also have a family tree program. I use a Mac so I have MacFamilyTree. You can save all your documents to your family tree maker, too. Most of those files are saved as a GEDCOM file, which is a universal program for genealogy.

My complaint with the family trees at Ancestry, I can upload a GEDCOM file to my family tree there, but I can't download a GEDCOM file of the information I've entered into my tree there to my MacFamilyTree.

Still, the price of the subscription is worth it if you plan to do some heavy research.

A word of warning: it doesn't matter what site you use to explore public family trees, do NOT ever take someone else's information as fact. Be able to document it yourself.

Happy hunting. Research is fun.