Genealogy Road Trip - Part 1

I'm thinking about taking a short weekend road trip to see where my Grandmother Elsa's people lived, married, raised families, and died in Gibson County, Indiana.  I've always wanted to go and just never taken the time.  I thought I could share some of my tips for successfully planning for such a trip and what fun it can be - even with kids along!

The key to a successful trip is in the careful preparation before you ever leave home.  There are lots of things to consider, both from a genealogy standpoint and a practical one.

I won't say, "The first thing to think about" because you can think about things in any order - just make sure to think about them!  So, how far away is Gibson County, IN from Warren Co., OH?  About 4.5 hours, give or take, depending on whether we go all highway or cross-country.  Will we need a hotel?  Yes, I'm thinking of going on a Saturday and returning on a Sunday.  When I take the kids along, I find a hotel with amenities like indoor pools and game rooms.  If it's just adults, I think about free breakfasts and cheap prices!

Who am I researching?  This is the critical part of planning.  You want to know the names of all the family members who were in that area.  There are several ways to carry your research compactly - I have used small notebooks with specially created smaller sized family group sheets, I have used a palm pilot, I've even taken the laptop - not owning a blackberry or similar device, I can't say how they work but I'm sure they would make a handy storage device for names and dates.  On one trip that was considerably longer and before great gadgets, I was going to several counties in one state, each one to focus on a different family.  I wrote all the critical info in the notebook and just flipped pages when I had to flip to a new family.  It actually worked really well and I gathered massive amounts of information.

Next, where is the local courthouse and will I want to visit it?  Well, if I did, Saturday would be the wrong day to go because it would be closed.  I would need to know where the county seat is, what the hours are, what type of records I would find there, and what specifically I am looking for.  If the name you are looking for is very common, like Johnson, then you don't want to pay for copies of records for Johnsons that aren't related.  You want to know which Johnsons.  Elsa's father, Henry, had a first wife, Mary, and a second wife, also Mary.  There are probably lots of Mary Johnsons and Henry Johnsons so I want to know specific time periods so I don't waste valuable time.

In my next post, I'll address other places you'll want to visit.

Find A Grave

One of the projects I have been spending a lot of time on lately is added photos to the Find A Grave website.   This site has over 44 million listings and can be an incredibly useful source because it shows the actual headstone, which in MOST cases is pretty accurate.  However, much to my frustration, I am also discovering that people are posting things about my family that is just wrong!  My father was not the grandson of the governor of Iowa, nor was my great-grandfather married to Rhoda Sullivan.  The people who post these things are the ones who initially entered info on that person and therefore "own" that virtual grave and only they can change it.  So far, I am striking out in getting people to correct their mistakes or transferring control of those "memorials" to me.  It is incredibly frustrating!  Now I know how people feel when they see an error on my Casto Connections website.  I have even found where someone took a photo right off my website and placed in on Find A Grave, a direct violation of their rules.  So with the good the site does, there is a little bad as well.  I guess I wouldn't use what I find there as a "strong" source but the good news is that if someone has uploaded a photo of your ancestor's tombstone, it still exists!  One other problem is that the site seems to be "down" a lot but with so much information and so many people uploading on a daily basis, that doesn't surprise me.  Overall, I've been very pleased with being able to add dozens of tombstone photos for my ancestors and their families and I also feel very fortunate that I have had the opportunities to go to so many of the final resting places of my kin and take the photos myself.  Always count your blessings!

Until Next Time!

Danita

Organizing Your Research - Part 5

We have been discussing how to organize your research.  I am finishing the topic with a few more tips and a review:

And what about all those thousands of emails? Keep them all! I bought my computer in the spring of 2005 and I have every (genealogy) email that I have received in the past five years. Once again, I use the search feature to look for names, dates, or conversations I vaguely remember but didn’t want to print out. I helped the NIELSON family 3 years ago and all the emails related to that are still in that folder. I do sort the emails by surname – Castos being the heavy favorite – at about 20 a week x 52 weeks x 5 years = at least 5200 Casto emails! But I’ve rarely lost a single one.

Here is an important tip that a lot of researchers don’t think about. If your computer crashed and you lost all your data, have you made a back up? I can hear the heads nodding yes already! Let’s take that scenario one step further. If a wild fire were to force you into immediately evacuating your home, is your backup disk in the same room as your computer? Ah, most people would say yes. I took the time to make TWO extra backups of my data, scanned the most precious photos and certificates and those items that I would be devastated to lose, and I gave the cd’s to my brothers who live in different cities.

So, lets do a quick review.

 

• There is no great magic wand to make years of papers go away but you don’t have to organize it all in one day, either.

 

• Organize your files in a manner that works best for the way YOU think about your research. Combine binders and folders to create something that works with how you want to find your information.

• Plan ahead for what you’re trying to accomplish, the space you have to work with, and don’t waste money buying filing accessories you may not use.

 

• If you use sheet protectors, make sure you have good quality archival type on hand for the really important documents. Regular pages you’ve copied or printed don’t always need to be in the best type but for those important documents you want to last, spend the extra money.

 

• Write on the back of photos! You may remember where and when that vacation photo was taken and I bet your grandmother did, too, so she didn’t write on the back of hers. For best results, use photo safe ink pens and have your favorite photos printed on good quality paper at the store.

• Speaking of photos, we all love our digital images but will our “jpg’s” of 2010 even be viewable on whatever devices your descendents will be using? Think about the future of your research as well as your use of it today.

 

• Do not get overwhelmed just because you have so many documents to sort through. Grab a small stack at a time or have a buddy help you go through them.

 

• Make technology work for you with your electronic versions. You can use search engines on your computer to find “lost” documents and emails but it helps if you start with a naming system that you can easily remember.

 

• Make backups of your research and your documents so that all your hard work won’t get lost. You don’t have to do this frequently but don’t forget to update it every once in a while, either.

Organizing Your Research - Part 4

Today as I was taking a walk in the woods near Cowan Lake in Clinton Co., OH, I ran across an old cemetery.  It was in pretty bad shape but I was able to find a way in and took photos of a lot of the headstones because I like to upload those if I find no one has done so yet.  Well, imagine my surprise when I ran across one of the CASTO families that I have been researching for many years.  Then I ran across some CAST tombstones and that immediately told me which line this was because there was a CAST-CASTO marriage in 1824 and I had obviously stumbled across their territory.  Thank goodness I have my files organized at home and was able to immediately put the tombstones photos with the right names in my database and use the photos as another source for my information.  I just couldn't believe that I ran across these Castos in the woods like that because the name is very rare in these parts.  There are none in Warren County where I live, nor neighboring Butler, Hamilton, or Clermont County.  But here I found two Castos who had died in 1835 & 1840 while I was looking for pretty scenery to shoot!  My Lucky Day!

Now, let’s talk about those computer files. I bet there are many people here who have almost as many downloaded census records, photos, cemetery lists, and emails as us “old-timers” have paper files and printed pages. How do you keep them all organized on your computer? That is a little trickier because it depends a lot on how well you know how to use your computer and your genealogy program, if you even use one. When I am teaching new computer users how to save documents, I show them how to create a folder on their desktop and then download or copy files to it. While I was giving my presentation the other night, one person pointed out that is sometimes hard to do for newbies but if I am right there with them, it's much easier to teach.  Once you’ve mastered that, it works very much the same as if you were putting the documents in a real filing cabinet. One of the greatest advantages to having computer files is the ease is which you can search for them. It helps if you have developed a naming system that works with how you think of things – my census records always start YEAR – NAME - PLACE. That way I can look into the “John Casto Family Folder” to see immediately how many census records I have, plus scanned images of bible records, wills, cemetery photos, etc. I have found that my genealogy program can import and attach these same images but boy, does it add to the size of the file. And when I create a gedcom, it makes it too large for some people to import or download. As you organize your electronic files, you may be inspired to use a similar method on your paper files!

There will be one more blog on Organizing and then on to a new subject - please feel free to leave comments if there is something you would like me to address.

Organizing Your Research - Part 3

My blogs are becoming more popular and I've been asked to give another talk - this time on the subject I'm writing about right now - Organizing your research.  Obviously, I don't want this blog to keep mimicking my talks or vice versa so I'll try and work out a way to keep the content fresh on all sides.  Besides the writing I'm doing here and the talks I've been presenting on Facebook for Ancestorville Genealogy, I'm also re-starting the Casto Connections newsletters and writing articles for that.  All this writing has to be fit into my schedule after I come home from work or on the weekends, along with paying attention to my family (if they insist!).  But I hope my readers have been enjoying my blogs and will continue to check in as I add more and more content!  After the talk tomorrow I will load the link here for anyone who is interested.

Now, I’ve talked a lot about binders and given you ideas about how to use them. But what if you don’t have a lot of shelf space or don’t think that would work for you? Well, you can use file folders and cabinets. At one point when I was feeling very overwhelmed with my papers so I started out very simply. I got a small plastic filing crate and some green hanging folders. I put it on my desk and grabbed a stack of papers and just started sorting them, putting each letter or document into a folder and writing a little tag for it as I went along. I quickly began to see what sorting method was working for me and was able to get several stacks filed in one afternoon. When my crate was full, I moved the contents (actually had my kids move the contents) to the filing cabinet and repeated the process with the next stack.

Here is another tip that I have thought of but never been able to put into practice because for many years I lived many states away from close family. It’s more fun to do any chore with help. Do you have family members or cousins you haven’t see in a while who could spend a couple hours helping sort and organize without stopping to ooh and aah over every paper they pick up? Get them to help you organize those records and photos and then when you’re done for the day, ooh and aah over something while enjoying a cup of tea. Plus, you’d be amazed at what stories they may know that you’ve never heard!

My next post will include tips on organizing your computer files...

Organizing Your Research - Part 2

If you do use binders, here are some things to think about:

• I started out with a different color for each family but quickly ran out of colors because I have more families than the store had different colors. Later, I moved to all one color with labels on the binder edge so they looked neater.

• Another way to use the color system is to just go with 4 colors – one for each of your grandparents’ lines.

• By trying to sort them by family, I almost immediately ran into the problem of which book gets the marriage certificate when two people marry and I have a binder for each family… In trying to cut down on paperwork, I didn’t want to make duplicates and add more paper! That’s how the certificate binder came to be. I also had one for census records that got abandoned due to evolving methods of storing them. I need to create a cemetery binder because I do reference those a lot and from a lot of locations and I can add pictures, too.

One of the most critical things you can do and one most often overlooked is writing on the back of photos. We wish our ancestors had identified everyone but then we do the same thing. It’s easy to think I remember that vacation and who is in that photo but years from now, someone else may have those photos and not have a clue who those people are or where they were taken.

 

Another thing about photos is that so much is done digitally now that a lot of photos are never printed. Will jpgs still be around 20 years from now? I suggest having your favorite digital shots printed at the store, not on a home computer, so they will last longer. And then write on the back.

More to follow soon!