Do you love digital records? Pros and Cons?

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At first glance I’m sure most of us would readily agree. After all, what’s not to like in being able to search various genealogical records at any time, day or night, wherever you are in the world. The heavy hitters of the genealogy world, Ancestry, Find My Past, My Heritage, Family Search, and a plethora of others, keep offering us a smorgasbord of delightful records from various countries.  Archives and Reference Libraries also have been motivated by the growth of the family history industry to digitise some of their records, and index others. Among these, Australia’s Trove is a totally free wonderland of treasures of all sorts. You might be surprised how many overseas stories are covered there.

Similarly it’s great that, no matter where we live, we can become friends with people we’ve never met in person but with whom we share a passion for all things genealogical – this blog being just one example of collaboration without geographical boundaries.

So why am I even asking what might be classed a rhetorical question? Let me explain.

I’m a geneadinosaur having started my research when personal computers were in the infancy of their use and had vastly less memory than today’s memory sticks. Archives and reference libraries were meant for “serious” researchers and genealogists really weren’t catered for to any great extent. This made for a tough learning curve but it did generate determination, record discrimination, and some grassroots acquisition of knowledge.

With some pretty tight closure periods to data it also made for a good exercise in lateral thinking as to how to find the information you wanted. For example, death indexes closed? Search newspapers (via microfilm), request searches for death certificates, look for family names in funeral notices, search cemeteries (on site), and use funeral director’s books.

So am I advocating a return to the “good ol' days”?

Not at all but I do think there are some things which we can tend to miss when viewing shaky leaves or findings via other online options.

• I  think one of the biggest issues with digital records is the tendency to zero straight in on ”your” one record and only that one….I know I do it sometimes. 

When you’re looking at an online census record (or any other) do you go straight to the name you’ve been searching for ?

Do you look at the adjoining pages to see if there’s family nearby?

Do you hunt down missing family members in case they’re staying with extended family?

Do you look to see what sort of neighbourhood they live in, who their neighbours were, and their occupations?

What standard of housing they’re living in? 

• Do you document the source you’ve used to find that information? I’ll bet a fiver that each and every one of us has made that omission, especially in the early days of our research!

• Do you explore what else is available for your place of interest by searching by place name? Most of the big genie-resources let you do that and you may find that there’s a totally unexpected record that might be of relevance to your search.

• Do you quickly conclude that if you can’t find something in one of the online sources do you assume it just doesn’t exist? Do you check the timeframe for the specific record you’re searching? You might also want to check the catalogues for the archives in your ancestral places.

• Do you use Family Search’s catalogue to see what they have offline? There is so much available that still isn’t digitised. I often see queries from people with Irish ancestry, for example, where the microfilms are available for ordering in at a pittance. Many a genealogical problem can be solved by eye-balling the original microfilmed document. You are the one familiar with your family and you’re more likely to pick up families whose names have been spelled inconsistently, or where occupations or townlands might solve your mystery. 

• How do you maintain your genealogical information? In narrative form? In a genealogy program? Online? What are the benefits of each? I’ve often mentioned on my blog that I find genealogy programs like a straight-jacket: useful for the lineage but not the nuances, or perhaps that’s just the gap in how I use them. For years I’ve used an Australian program called Relatively Yours because it allowed me to add the sort of biographical nuances typical of families. However for various reasons I’m about to change track and move across to Family Historian…I’m hoping it will stack up favourably based on geminate recommendations.

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  How do you keep track of what you’ve got? Do you maintain a research log? Put everything in Evernote? Store digital files, preferably with a consistent naming format? 

I confess to being too haphazard in this regard and I need to do quite a bit of work tidying up my computer files. With decades of information and a mountain of paper files to digitise it will keep me busy.

It seems I’m not alone in this data confusion judging by the buzz round the geneaglobe generated by Thomas MacEntee’s Genealogy Do-Over and there’s heaps of ideas coming from the Facebook group.

• Do you go back and look over your files, digital or hard copy to check your data recording is correct and you’ve absorbed all the information on each document?

•  Do you purchase documents you need, especially certificates? Again, I’m often surprised by “brick walls” which could be knocked down with a relatively small expenditure. Yes, the costs add up but it’s cheaper than golf or sailing or…and they can always be presents.

• Having found the document, saved it and documented it, do you then forget all about it as it disappears into your computer system?

• Are you overwhelmed by the sheer avalanche of information coming out almost daily? How do you approach the process systematically? I’d certainly like to hear your ideas on that!

  

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During 2015 I’m hoping to have a spring-clean of the record copies I hold. I’ll be digitising them (partly as a safety strategy given the risk of cyclones); slowly checking my file names and reviewing what I have and what I need to follow up. Here’s what I wrote about my 2015 goals.

So what’s your position on the pros and cons of digitised records, or more importantly, how we use them in our research? Please share your thoughts in the comments…I’d certainly like to hear them.