Documenting your Research

If you are just starting out in family history research, LEARN TO DOCUMENT YOUR SOURCES FROM THE START! I hate to admit how often I have looked back over my years of research and wondered where I found that really "good" piece of information. Sometimes I have gotten a great gedcom from a distant cousin----but with no clue as to where the data was obtained and how accurate it is.

Documenting doesn't have to be hard. You just tell where you got the information. If you copied the names and dates from Grandpa's Book of Rememberence, that is your source. If Great Aunt Sally told you the story of your family settling in the area, she is your source. If you read an index of a census, then indicate that it was an index that you noted as opposed to seeing the actual census. The idea is to for you or someone else to be able to know where the information came from. A cousin may want to see for themselves where you found the information---or they can evaluate use it to evaluate the accuracy of the source. (See the posting on sources)

PAF and other personal family history programs offer a great way to source the information. Your ward family history consultant can help you learn to do this, or come to the Declo Family History Center on Thursdays for personal help. If you find several family members in the same census or the Western States Marriage Index, etc., you can enter the source once in the source list. You just click on that source to add it to any person listed in that source. Even better, you can personalize that person's page to show not only the source, but the specific information for that person. I'm not explaining it well, but it works great and is easy to do once you know how.

I use the notes page in my PAF or Ancestral Quest programs to save information. In the "olden days" we were encouraged to submit our PAF records, including notes, to the Ancestral File or Pedigree Resource File. With the new family search, we do not do that. So my note page is "mine" now. I use my notes page to copy information that I may not have room to put into the sources page. Before that, I would write my findings---or my thoughts on where to look next---on little pieces of paper which are somewhere in the house, I hope. Now I put them in the individual's notes. I like to date my entries. It is fun to go back and see what I was thinking about a family and realize that I have made progress. Any sensitive material should be entered under confidential notes (see your instructions) or kept in another file. Be sure when sharing histories to click the box that prevents confidential notes from being transferred. Some sensitive information in our family tree was inadvertedly added to Ancestral File and is now permanently recorded in new family search. Whoops! The relative who did it would be really upset if she knew she had shared that with the world.

One of the helpers at the Burley Family History Center insisted that I not only make a copy of the page of a book but to copy the Title page and the page with the publication information and staple them together. That goes for scanning books as well. I was in the basement of the Burley FH Center a while ago searching through their Missouri section. I picked up a book, flipped through it, and found an entry that a James Gray accompanied a family from Bourbon County, Kentucky, to Clay County, Missouri. WOW!!! What a clue!!!!! So I copied the info quickly into my planner----but left off the title of the book. So a few months later, I was downstairs again, rummaging through the bound books, hoping to be able to be find that paragraph again. It took me a while---a long while. So learn to document! It saves a lot of frustration!