28 October 2009

Taking the advice of Mr. George Morgan in his book, How to Do Everything: Genealogy (Second Edition), I am taking (small) steps to organize my research.  I have expanded from one binder to two binders now - one for my mom's side of the family and one for my dad's.  This will have to do for a while as the items I want to use are a little pricey and hard to find.  But I really want to keep things as uniform as possible.

I finally broke down and filled out some pedigree charts to have in each notebook.  Those along with the forms I created should be enough for now.  (These custom forms are meant to be used for each individual in my lineage.  There I can record the basic information, similar to a profile page on an ancestry.com tree, as well as a checklist of sources to start with and a lineage chart to show me where the person is on the family tree).  I suppose that eventually I may do family sheets as well.  As I was filling out the pedigree charts, I noticed quite a lot of errors in date formats (on my digital tree) that I don't recall seeing before.  It may just be me, but I will definitely need to fix that.  I can't stand inconsistency!

I admit that I get bored quite quickly and easily when I have to focus on just one person at a time, but the more I think about it, the more I think that that is something I ought to be doing in my research.  It seems that if I do that, it may be easier to tell the person's story.  But on the other hand, I really want to progress in the lineage!  If I really think about it, though, in theory the more information I have on an individual, the easier it should be to find information on their family members.

Catching Up

I have been researching for at least 3 years now. When I first began to research "seriously," I thought it would be simple and that I would catch on quickly and easily. While that is true of what happened, I am now beginning to realize that I should have started out by researching the proper way to pursue genealogical research.

After several years - and several hundred names have been added to my family tree - I am only now finding out the proper way to approach this type of research in a thorough way. I will have to begin, for one thing, going back over my tree and citing sources of information that I previously omitted. I want to do it right!

I am beginning this journal in hopes of making documentation easier, and perhaps someone else may one day benefit from my experiences. I plan to use it each time I research as a way to record my findings and thoughts, since they all seem to come and transition so easily and quickly. We shall see!