Video Of The Week: Genealogical Proof Standard: Soundly Reasoned, Coherently Written Concl...

We watch a lot of videos in the Cave. Webinars, instructional videos, continuing education videos, you name it! If it helps with our genealogical pursuit we are all over it!

Each week we thought we'd share one we've enjoyed.

Hope you enjoy it too!






©2017 Anne Faulkner - AncestorArchaeology.net, All Rights Reserved

Video Of The Week: Genealogical Proof Standard: Resolution of Conflicting Evidence

We watch a lot of videos in the Cave. Webinars, instructional videos, continuing education videos, you name it! If it helps with our genealogical pursuit we are all over it!

Each week we thought we'd share one we've enjoyed.

Hope you enjoy it too!






©2017 Anne Faulkner - AncestorArchaeology.net, All Rights Reserved

Video Of The Week: Genealogical Proof Standard: Complete and Accurate Citation of Sources

We watch a lot of videos in the Cave. Webinars, instructional videos, continuing education videos, you name it! If it helps with our genealogical pursuit we are all over it!

Each week we thought we'd share one we've enjoyed.

Hope you enjoy it too!






©2017 Anne Faulkner - AncestorArchaeology.net, All Rights Reserved

Video Of The Week: Genealogical Proof Standard: Reasonably Exhaustive Search

We watch a lot of videos in the Cave. Webinars, instructional videos, continuing education videos, you name it! If it helps with our genealogical pursuit we are all over it!

Each week we thought we'd share one we've enjoyed.

Hope you enjoy it too!






©2017 Anne Faulkner - AncestorArchaeology.net, All Rights Reserved

Video Of The Week: Genealogy Methodology: View Your Family Tree a Different Way

We watch a lot of videos in the Cave. Webinars, instructional videos, continuing education videos, you name it! If it helps with our genealogical pursuit we are all over it!

Each week we thought we'd share one we've enjoyed.

Hope you enjoy it too!









©2017 Anne Faulkner - AncestorArchaeology.net, All Rights Reserved

Field Notes: Writing Out A Brick Wall

I started a new series recently. Brick Wall Ancestors. Thought it'd be good to release them out into the wild and do a little crowd-sourcing. If they are brick walls for me, they may be for someone else too. Well, wouldn't you know it, seeing as they are Brick Walls and all, truthfully I had not really looked into them recently.  Sure, I revisit them about once a year - mostly just looking for any new records that might have cropped up. Well, things change when you start to write a blog about it! Or maybe I should say, when you start to write about it. Period. Laying it out linearly, putting into words what I had and had not discovered just threw a monkey wrench into the whole thing! In a good way, mind you.

The thing with writing, with telling a tale, the story needs to progress. Getting from point A to point B needs logical explanation. Different than records only. Records confirm a fixed place in time. Handy to verify someone was somewhere sometime. BUT how did they get there? And why? Telling a non-fiction tale like we do with our ancestors requires research, logic, a knowledge of (then) current events and even laws of the time.

So, as I set out to write up my first Brick Wall Ancestor in story form I realized I had very little 'meat', which made me dig. And question. The facts that I had amassed (or not) would not adequately depict what I was trying to convey.

I began to think in new ways.

Which lead me to new discoveries.

Which broke my Brick Walls.

No, not all of them - but the first three I originally had planned on writing about gained parents, or a place of death, or two new generations of ancestors! Plus a whole slew of new places to travel to to really dig for additional clues. (Because we all know, only a fraction of records are available online!)

Here's what I learned:

• Gather ALL your information before you begin writing. It's as much about debunking or negative evidence as it is about acquiring new positive information. 
• Check the online databases frequently - you never know when some new record set will be digitized and available for viewing.
• Utilize social media and online genealogy research groups. If you are researching in Ohio for example, but live in Kansas you could travel to Ohio yourself (you should, eventually) or you could find an appropriate online group and post your research questions there. Most of the groups are filled with people who have experience researching in that group's particular area.
• Do you have three conflicting sources of birth location? Make sure the county boundaries didn't change, or the town itself didn't get renamed. (see below)
• Use maps. Old maps, Google maps, county maps. I have a tab with Google maps open all the time when I research - I put in point A (say, Cleveland OH, for example) and point B (say, Chautauqua NY) It sounds like quite a distance in my head, but when I look at it on Google Maps I see it is a 135 mile straight shot. Not out of the question for 'commuter' travel in 1850. In my research case, Cleveland may have been the  closest big city to obtain goods and services. I also use the heck out of  the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries.
• Fill in the years between the census with City Directories. Your ancestor might not turn up every year, but it gives you a clearer picture of their movements. And their occupations! Also, notice the neighbors. Immigrants especially tended to live near kin or countrymen - always another clue!
• Check land records, marriage/church records and wills. Quite a number are digitized now, if you are unable to travel to your research location. FamilySearch has a great number of unindexed records to scroll through - from home - and even more if you visit a Family History Center in you area.
• FAN research! Friends, associates and  neighbors. Sideways research always, always brings me new discoveries. 
• Don't leave out newspapers and other forms of social context. Depending on where you are researching, newspapers can pre-date some other types of documentation.
• Military records! Pensions, widow's pensions, muster rolls, battles - they all can hold a clue.  
• Family lineage and Town history books. Google Books, Internet Archive, FamilySearch, Ancestry, WorldCat - there is a vast number of books that might contain the information you seek. My Faulkner lineage was 'hidden' in a book on the lineage of the Bull/Wells family. (Which I initially learned about from an online genealogy group) 
• Question everything! Always ask 'why?' or 'How?'. Why did they attend church 50 miles and two counties away from their farm? How did they arrive where they did, and why did they leave?
• Now, WRITE IT OUT! Write out everything you know. Tell a story. Start with the facts and fill in the blanks. You will end up with a more solid idea of where to research next, and you might just discover a hidden clue or two that will bring that Brick Wall crashing.  

I'm not going to say that this is necessarily easy - or quick. But if you have the desire to really break through a Wall or two then putting in the time, the 'leg-work', the hours of travel you will undoubtedly take down a rabbit hole or two is well worth it. Not to mention the personal satisfaction that comes from solving a 'cold case'.

Bring a flashlight  .... and snacks.


©2017 Anne Faulkner - AncestorArchaeology.net, All Rights Reserved

Field Notes: Learning The Hard Way, My Enlightenment

I have always been stubborn. Sometimes that tenacity works in my favor, sometimes it's just bull-headed nonsense. Like beating a dead horse. (What an awful visual that is, by the way) Long ago when I first embarked on this adventure of discovery I just sort of bumbled along. Learning as I went. Making sometimes enormous mistakes in my ignorance. When I first discovered Ancestry.com I felt like I had truly discovered the Holy Grail. As I have confessed previously, I had "successfully" managed to click myself half-way to Jesus. When I got to about 800 AD I felt that maybe something wasn't quite right. I had on my hands a COLOSSAL family tree. So large it intimidated me. I knew I needed to fix it. To pare it down. To make it right. But a little voice inside my head whined, "what about all that work!" "maybe we are related to all those people!" "let's not get ahead of ourselves here!"

So I opted for ignorance. Clearly the better choice! I continued to work on the branches I could document. (Oh, I came to documentation a little late - after all if it's on the internet it must be true!) Blessedly, my father's side was more obscure and I had not been as "fortunate", in that there were not Trees, or Millenium Files, or Family Data collections to click and add. I actually had to learn genealogy the correct way to make any discoveries on my dad's line. (At this point that little voice started to whine, "Genealogy is HARD!")

And on that shaky, ill built foundation I began to add my first solid research.

A decade or more passed and I had a rock solid, impressive body of work. Hard earned and something I could be proud of. I also had appendages of appallingly bad, sophomoric "data" that made my head spin. There were upwards of 30,000 names on my tree. Not huge - huge, but realistically only 3,000 or so of them I could actually be confident of.

I tiptoed around the knowledge that a massive culling was in order. (I know now why there are so many abandoned trees out there!)  I circled the beast, circled and circled. I could not do it. I'd walk away, talk myself back into it, look at it and walk away again. My savior came in the name of the Genealogy Do-Over. Brilliantly crafted by Thomas MacEntee. Although his suggestion was to put aside previous work, I eventually opted for the culling. I did save a full copy of the horrendous tree before I started the killing ...... then I just dove in. Boy did it feel good! (Think Katniss a la Hunger Games)

Somewhere along the way I had created several different study trees for researching different branches, doing collateral research and following very far removed cousins. The original behemoth was already messy enough, I didn't want, or think I'd ever need, a 5th great aunt or a 7th cousin, twice removed.

I thought wrong.

But it has taken me quite a while to reach this conclusion.

For several years, I was quite happy working on this tree or that tree. Building nice family structures, branching out with children, and children of children. All separate. All neat. All organized. Until one day, when I was stuck on a seeming brick wall and trolling the chat groups for answers. I posed my query to a group on Facebook and immediately received a piece of the missing puzzle. The name I was given sounded familiar. Too familiar. Like, in one of my trees familiar. D'Oh!  Turns out, the mystery brick wall woman's 5th great grandfather was the brother of the 6th great grandmother of an ancestor on one of my other family branches! Breaking down my maternal and paternal trees had severed the possibility of me discovering this connection. Eliminating collateral "fluff from so far back" wiped away any connections I was likely to discover. I spent the rest of the day building the tree, referencing the other tree until I reached the common ancestor. (I know, wait for it...)

I was watching a lot of webinars at the time and kept hearing the same thing over and over from some of the best in the field. ONE BIG TREE. Keep only one big tree. But my previous experience with my original wildly out-of-control tree kept me from buying into it. My smaller, separate trees were working, um, reasonably well. I could focus more specifically on one branch or another. Sure, I was duplicating some of my work as I got farther back in time, but it was OK. I didn't mind reinventing the wheel every time I made another discovery.

The arguments were sound, logical. The trees these gurus were successfully maintaining were huge! Bigger than my original 30,000+ disaster. I had most emphatically learned my lesson the first time around (I know!) but I was scared of it getting out of control again. I blundered onward, two steps forward, one step back with my "safe" and "organized" methodology.

Until the day I decided to begin my Finding Faulkner series.

I actually have three working Faulkner trees with many of the same cast of characters, all with varying degrees of information. My main tree has direct ancestry only. The two others? One has all the descendants of my 4th great grandfather, the other contains all the Faulkners that were recorded in the William Bull/Sarah Wells Genealogy book.

At first, I was fine with flipping back and forth between trees as I reconstructed the tale. As I got farther back in time, however, it became more and more burdensome. The story was taking longer to tell. The documents I had used as sources for one tree needed to be added to the others. I even made a few additional discoveries! Things that by themselves seemed irrelevant once added to a more robust collateral family tree became obvious missing pieces. The story became infinitely richer, patterns emerged that I had not previously observed.

I finally understood. Bigger IS better. But only, and I stress, only when it is a correct well-sourced tree. Not only will you see patterns and relationships you would otherwise have missed, linking your DNA to this large tree will bring more kin, and more opportunities to collaborate.

Today is the day I begin the merge. It should be fairly easy in my FTM program. I'm a little nervous, but also excited to see my own Yggdrasil emerge from a bunch of separate yet related shoots.

Wish me luck! I'll let you know how it turns out ......




©2016 Anne Faulkner - AncestorArchaeology.net, All Rights Reserved