National Family History Month

Each August in Australia and New Zealand we celebrate National Family History Month.

My Genimate, Shauna Hicks is the voluntary coordinator for this event (in Australia) which is an initiative of AFFHO. All around Australia family history societies and groups, libraries, commercial organisations and individuals host events that promote our hobby/passion. Shauna enters these all these onto an online calendar so that we can see what is on offer in our local area.

In addition Shauna has created challenges for both individual and family history groups: 31 Activities for Researchers and 31 Activities for Genealogy/Family History Societies during NFHM. These are useful exercises not just for Australians but for all family historians.

And what about me?  I am attending a few events during the month and I have organised two events for my local family history group.

In addition I am hosting a Geneagala series of Google Hangouts on Air on Sunday 30th August. Because the Geneagala is an online activity it is open to genealogists all around the world. As a Worldwide Genealogist you are invited to join me and your friends downunder for this event.

Geneavlogging

Don't know what it is?

Please watch the video clip below.

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International Collaboration

Last month I wrote of my intention to join the Familysearch Worldwide Indexing Event, this is a followup post. 

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much” - Helen Keller. 

I am rather proud of the new badge (right) that my personal blog is wearing. Although I am pleased to have made a small contribution to the Familysearch Worldwide Indexing Event I am proud because the Worldwide event highlighted the benefits of collaboration in the genealogy and family history sphere. Just as our blog Worldwide Genealogy brings together genealogists from around the world whose individual contributions combine to produce this blog as a resource for the Worldwide genealogy community the Worldwide Indexing Event brought together genealogists from around the workd to index digital resources from Familysearch.

The Familysearch blog reports that 66,511 indexers collaborated in this event and "While the focus for this challenge was on the total number of participants, a tremendous amount of indexing and arbitration work was accomplished as well. Here are the results for the number of records indexed and arbitrated.

Indexed: 4,682,746

Arbitrated: 941,932

Total Records Processed: 5.7 million"

If you have ever trawled through pages of unindexed Familysearch digital images you will appreciate the value of having more than 5 million new records indexed.

What made this event even more special for me was another collaborative effort, a Google Hangout on Air - GeneaSleepOver: Worldwide Indexing Event,  spearheaded by DearMyrtle and her Cousin Russ Worthington. (I will add links to the four Youtube videos from this event to the bottom of this post.)

I listened to and chatted to the hosts Myrt and Russ and other panelists from the US and UK while I indexed my few batches, at one stage the camera was directed to my computer screen as I worked on indexing one of my batches. That was quite a challenge for a newbie indexer. Myrt had also asked me to join and talk aboout a topic of my choosing, I elected to chat about Australian Royalty - those people who have and are proud of their convict ancestry. 

I watched and listened to the Hangout for around 8 hours of the 24, I was on the panel at the beginning and rejoined for the end. I was thrilled to chat with fellow Worldwide Genealogy bloggers, young Australian genealogist and new indexing volunteer Caitlin Gow and Hilary Gadsby from Wales who has blogged about her indexing experience.

 In Australia we talk about the Tyranny of Distance, being able to participate in the Hangout while participating in the Worldwide Indexing Event broke down the barrier of isolation we sometimes feel in Australia. Thanks to Myrt and Russ for organising this event.

GeneaSleepOver: Worldwide Indexing Event - Video (a):



GeneaSleepOver: Worldwide Indexing Event - Video (b):


GeneaSleepOver: Worldwide Indexing Event - Video (c):



GeneaSleepOver: Worldwide Indexing Event - Video (d):

Can We Step up to the Challenge

How Are Your Analysis Skills?

 Background

Pat Richley-Erickson Aka DearMYRTLE posted a challenge to any of her followers/readers on her blog on 2nd April 2014 (1) .

In this post I want to discuss how I approached this, and how on reviewing, I discovered I had issues when analysing my sources.

If you are not aware I am one of the panellists discussing Mastering Genealogical Proof (2) in Study Group 2 a hangout on air recording being held on Sundays. (Schedule available on DearMYRTLE blog (3)) So this challenge is putting any knowledge I have retained from these discussions to the test.

Preparation

Deciding what to write about to create an interesting but not too lengthy post was my first challenge. I have plenty of sources but which ones do I use and should I approach this as a new researcher should and decide on what question I wanted to answer. One might think this was an easy thing to do but like many new researchers I found these sources with an almost "scattergun" approach and it can take something to look at them outside of what is recorded in the standard genealogy software programs.

After at least one failed attempt this was the question I came up with " Who were the siblings and parents of my grandmother who was orphaned? ".

The 3 documents were a birth certificate, census and orphanage document.

Reasons for not publishing

Before I finished writing my post whilst in the process of writing my citations I realised that 2 of the sources I was about to use had the same author.

Both the Birth Certificate and the letter for the orphanage were created by the Superintendent Registrar for Warminster and he had signed both documents.

My original hypothesis to the question about what siblings my grandmother had would have been incorrect. I only ever knew she had one brother, if you look at the census record she is the youngest of 5 children (4). The next question was why had I only ever known the 1 brother.

I should have laid out what I knew about my grandmother and possibly cited this as personal knowledge. I could have also cited her son and daughters for the additional information they had provided.

Also, in retrospect, I had set a question whose parameters were much too broad.

My research question could have been as simple as When was my grandmother born? or Who were her parents?.

In my attempt to show what I had found I had not considered how I had got there.

The records I have contain a large amount of useful information, much of it can be classed as primary. But the number of documents I will need to cite, to fully build my conclusions for the question I originally posed, will most certainly exceed the three I was initially going to use.

I hope that this exercise has shown that we not only need to analyse the documents that we use but we need to think about how we obtained them and have they answered the question that we originally wanted to answer. Why the records were originally created, is a question we need to ask if we do not wanted to duplicate sources from the same informant.

So are YOU and your ANALYSIS SKILLS up to the CHALLENGE if so then please join in.

We can all benefit from peer review and even if you don't plan to publish your research in a recognised journal it is well worth it for the thought process it takes to put your case.

When I get more time in the coming week I hope to step up to this challenge and I will post a link in the comments. 

References

1. http://blog.dearmyrtle.com/2014/04/the-ragu-challenge-3-2-1-cite.html
2. Thomas W. Jones, Mastering Genealogical Proof (Arlington, Virginia: National Genealogical Society, 2013), 6. [Book available from the publisher at http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/cs/mastering_genealogical_proof ]
3. http://blog.dearmyrtle.com/2014/04/mgp2-still-on-chapter-5-but-working-on.html
4. 1901 census of England, Wiltshire, Warminster, Christchurch parish, folio 37 recto, p.9, household 53, Edmond Compton; digital image, Find My Past (http://new.findmypast.co.uk/ : accessed 5th April 2014) ; citing PRO RG13 /1943

Why I am getting organized? and how features of Family Historian have helped.

At the Beginning of the Year I published a post on my blog about how I am trying to get organized see [http://genemeet.blogspot.co.uk/].

From the popularity of the Facebook group, The Organized Genealogist,  I am not the only genealogist who is trying to get organized, or become more organized.
If you are a professional genealogist then of course it makes financial sense to be organized.
If like me you are a hobbyist then you probably have much less time to spend doing genealogy, unless you are "retired" you will likely have at least a part time job and family commitments that can also take up much of your time.

So why should I get organized

• I have limited time to research so I want to make the most of what time I have.
• If I am organized I can find items I want easily and quickly.
• When others ask about relatives I have in my online trees I can answer their queries in a more timely manner. 
• I have a lot of people in my WikiTree [http://www.wikitree.com/] and most of them need updating or the sources need cleaning up. Not everyone is properly sourced.
• I do not want to duplicate my research. 
• How many of us have at some point wasted time researching something/someone we have done previously. Have you got duplicates in your files?
• This is not to say we should not go back and repeat something where we had a negative result on an online database. Online databases are regularly adding new records and can be worth searching on a regular basis for those brickwalls.
• I have a lot of paper records some are original records, others just copies or printouts. 
• I need to get these onto my computer so that I do not overlook anything they contain.
• I have numerous photographs. If I scan and add metadata to the digital files I will know who is in these photographs and when they were taken. 
• As my older relatives may be the only ones to know who is in some of the older photographs I need to make this a priority before it is too late.
• I have upgraded from Custodian 3 to Custodian 4 [http://www.custodian4.co.uk/] . I have spent money on this upgrade and should make sure I spent this money wisely. It now has links to the media which was why I upgraded. 
• Whilst Family Historian [http://www.family-historian.co.uk/] links to media from individuals and sources Custodian is useful for those records you have not had chance to fully analyse or where you are not entirely sure where they fit in the tree.
• Custodian is a useful program for anyone doing a One Name Study[www.one-name.org/‎] or a One Place Study[one-place-studies.org/‎].
• I have also upgraded to Evidentia 2 [http://evidentiasoftware.com/] and as I am keen to make use of this program to analyse my sources I need to be able to find all my sources easily.
• Finally starting later this month I will be involved with MGP Study Group 2 [http://blog.dearmyrtle.com/2013/11/call-for-panelists-dearmyrtles-mgp.html] I want to make the most of this opportunity and be ready to apply what I learn from sharing with others.

Let me tell you a bit more about how some of the feature of Family Historian have helped me with organization.

I have decide to go along the line of colour coding for the various lines of my tree which can be best illustrated by the fan chart below.

As a backup and for quick reference I have started, what some might consider a backward approach, by adopting a card index for basic family information using the same colour scheme (pink cards as no red available).

I have also used another facility available in Family Historian which is the named list.

Named lists can contain any record in the main record tabs of the program 

and notes can be added to each item in the list. The list report will show each of the notes added as illustrated below this report can be printed in various formats and allows the information to be sent to another device.

All the software programs I use have some powerful features many of which I have either not discovered or not used to any great extent. But as the volume of documents I have collected has expanded, I find that understanding what I am using,  and what features are available is becoming increasingly important. 

Do you use all the features of your software to assist your research? 

Could you benefit from understanding it better?

I attended a course on Family Historian for those with some knowledge and learnt that although I new a lot I was not an expert. If you get the chance to learn from others do so. It always helps to analyse why you are doing something and could you do things better.

A few ways in which you can learn from others from the comfort of your own home for free.

Google Hangouts or Hangouts on Air to view live, which may be available to view later on You Tube.

Genealogy Webinars see the calendar here http://blog.geneawebinars.com/

Geneablogs which you may not be aware of have a look here http://geneabloggers.com/

But you cannot beat the chance to speak to other like minded genealogists so if you can make it to a local fair, conference, jamboree or whatever they call it where you live then this will pay dividends.

Sharing and collaboration have always been part of being a family historian and even in these days of increasing online resources no one is an island. Make the most of others knowledge and above all enjoy yourself.

Next time I will discuss how I applied what I learnt at Hack Genealogy Boot Camp http://hackgenealogy.com/genealogy-groove-boot-camp-25-january-2014/