Comments on: Family History Basics – Lesson 2

By: Blogger of Jared » Blog Archive » Family History, You Can Do-oo It!

Blogger of Jared » Blog Archive » Family History, You Can Do-oo It! — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 23:30:30 +0000

[...] has made it Easy as can be! She’s giving lessons there, teaching basic tips, Read lesson one, two, and three. She’s an expert and she’ll help you Start your family [...]

By: BruceC

BruceC — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:33:49 +0000

Well, it would be little far (1,600 miles) for me to get to the SLC Family History Library. But the online documentry sources would be of considerable interest to me. I have been stumbling on them a few at a time, and I don’t know what I’m missing. And things like Cyndi’s list are so large, it takes research skills just to sort through it all.

As an aside I have been working on “step 1 of lesson 2″ for several years. It’s not that there are no holes that require original research, it’s just that adding another branch that someone else has already researched is so much easier. And the holes are there for a reason.

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:47:57 +0000

BruceC, starting with the next lesson, I’m going to go over some specific sources or types of records, and how to find them, that might help you with documentation. Starting now, anybody who is reading these lessons is going to be on their own research path different from everybody else. The sources I’ll start with will be the ones easiest to find and to search, and then we’ll move along to older, harder ones.

After we’ve gone over some of the easier sources, I plan to ask for a few real-life examples from readers’ pedigrees. I can’t offer to solve all problems or do original research for anybody, but I’ll look at the examples and explain where I would go to look for evidence.

I’m still debating the wisdom of this one, but if I can work it out, I’d be willing to set up a field trip with a small group of readers at the Salt Lake Family History Library (sorry, everybody at a distance) for an afternoon or evening of working on your own research. I could review your chart, suggest a research strategy, and you would do the searching yourself with me there to answer questions if you get stuck. But I’d like to go over some common documentary sources, especially ones you can do online, before we set up anything like that.

By: BruceC

BruceC — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:46:26 +0000

I’m running into the same things. Navigating the non-member parts of my wife’s family yeilds more temple work than the over researched parts of mine. Two months ago I thought I had found a branch of the family that had been missed. The whole branch had left the church. After weeks of work collecting names I found a distant cousin. She was three years ahead of me. I’m glad to have met her, and glad to fill in the blanks, but still no temple work needed. And this wasn’t the first time.

So I’ve been trying to find new ways to document what I have. I want to flesh out the details and resolve contradictory facts. I’m just so new to this I haven’t learned all the right sources yet.

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:20:27 +0000

LOL! Yeah, I feel your pain. My mother’s researched family history was easier to document, but I had to go way out on limbs in order to find parents of in-laws of cousins of spouses who needed temple work, while my dad’s unknown family history was more difficult to dig out, but with the automatic reward of temple ordinances at the end.

I have a friend who descends from the Youngs, Bensons, Pratts, and other well-known families. He’s worked on documenting his lines for years, and a while ago he finally found a great aunt who had married a nonmember and gone away from the family and church and had been still living the last time anybody had done massive amounts of temple work. Just one person, but he didn’t give up before he found her.

By: Researcher

Researcher — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:02:37 +0000

I’m still waiting for school to start to order my copy of Reunion (and might wait and wait since the teachers are threatening a walk-out), but when the program comes I’ll get started on lesson number two (which will consist, first, of contacting my dad for his latest computer files, and second, contacting my husband’s mother to see what they have).

I don’t know which situation is more difficult: having the genealogy “done” which means I get to help clean up files and identify spurious connections and make sure everything is documented; or having to start from scratch. At least the starting-from-scratch people have the ability to do some temple work for their ancestors (suppressing jealousy here).