Sorting Family History

Susan Olsen LeBlanc September 28 at 7:30 PM · Shared with Public Bought my favorite notebooks, page protectors for original documents and nice, colorful dividers. The last part of sorting I am finding more duplication! The change in copies relates to technology advanced over the years.

Reflections of 2016

The New Year is fast approaching and we will be soon writing 2017. This has been a good year for me. Here are some highlights for 2016. This year there have been several clients whose families came from the south. It is fascinating putting together their family history from the point of online records. Those families with African American backgrounds demonstrate the tenacity with which they moved forward after the Civil War. They were ambitious and strongly focused on providing for the advancement of their families. While many were farmers of some form or another, others were teachers or held other professional positions. As the pedigree charts filled in it became obvious that research beyond the Civil War would provide more challenges.

Unraveling Another Family Collection

For the past two weeks my focus has been on unraveling another family collection. The researcher was a woman who had a great love for her family history and also an interest in joining lineage societies. In the process of her work they were able to join DAR through a third great grandfather.  Others joined SAR through the direct line second great grandfather, but later it was proven that there had been an error in identifying him. He was born in 1792 in Ireland and the family came to America in 1793. There was also a Civil War soldier from the family, the brother of a second great grandfather.

Cleaning Up Your Genealogy Files

The ongoing process of cleaning up genealogy files will be never ending. No matter what you do today there will always be changes to the formats used and information requirements involved. Thomas MacEntee is currently embarking on a program called a Genealogy Do-Over. This is something I have done for several of my family lines from time to time. Creating clean files, especially within online genealogy family trees, is critical to our ongoing research. Using a systematic format of recording information is the basis of researching.

Today I discovered that someone has extended my Tidd family back several generations. The changes are recent and yet there are no sources or notes to indicate how the information was accumulated. In hopes of starting a dialogue about this family information an email was sent to the contributor. The chance of a response is about 50/50. Within five hours there was a response and it was very interesting. The responder noted that they are only related by marriage, but "simply put all the pieces of the puzzle together that were already there." The person is "an unofficial full time volunteer who tries to fix things when I can." They, "put much effort into this, and it is refreshing to receive thanks instead of hate mail for their efforts."

While some of the new information included birthdates in the 1500s, it is probable that the information either came from parish registers, probate records or other community records. Some of these records were microfilmed years ago, but recently were digitized and provided online to researchers. There were records from Norfolk, England for the family that were recently noticed on familysearch.org. These more recent ones are from Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, Hampshire, England also from familysearch.org. Now it is important to go back and compare the information from both locations.