Organizing Your Research

Click here to visit My Genealogy Store

 

Being organized helps you to better collate sources, compare them, evaluate them, identify discrepancies, and make reasonable conclusions. Well-documented family group records are the best source of ideas for research objectives. Up-to-date family group records also help you judge the reliability and fit of newly discovered sources with what you already know.

The main value of organized research logs is to show all the sources you have searched, and help you recall your search purposes and strategies. Good logs help you resume research after a pause, and avoid re-using sources already tried.

Too many negative searches on a research log show it is time to search in a different way. Being well organized saves you time, and it contributes to better research and results.

 

Organize and Document as you go

Before you start research have a research log and well-documented family group record in hand. After research do not lay your head on your pillow until you have finished your paper work and filing.

 

Hierarchy of research goals. 

Have an overall goal to share your research findings with others.

Have a goal to research a cluster of families—usually families that settled near each other. 

Have a goal to thoroughly document the events in one of those families before starting research on the next family.

 

Have a goal to understand that family, and why they behaved as they did.

Have an objective to document one event at a time in one person’s life in that family. If the first search fails, continue with that objective with different sources, jurisdictions, or repositories. Don’t give up until you find a source to document the selected event or exhaust all the possibilities trying.

Research the easiest events first. What you learn from easier documents will help you find more difficult to locate sources.

DO NOT reorganize the way described below until you pick up research on a family—no mass reorganization of all files at once.

DO NOT be discouraged if you filing system is not perfect. We get better with experience.

EASY SYSTEM

This system is based on creating one file folder for each family you research.

One Family consists of a father, a mother, and their children.

One File Folder (a manila file folder) contains:

1. family group record (required)
2. pedigree chart (optional)
3. maps of family settlements (optional)
4. research log (required) Research Log Example

It is important to partially fill-in a research log before you view a source:

1. Date
2. Place of research
3. Purpose - write the person-event you seek for each search so you will later know whether you need to search the same source again for a different person or event.
4. Call Number (if any)
5. Source - write source descriptions in footnote format (see the Chicago Manual of Style¹) Example of Footnote Style

Why complete these before a search. Avoid the temptation to skip writing anything at all if the search results are negative. If you finish writing these items before the search, and if your ancestor is not mentioned in the source, it is easier to write nil than it would be to fill in all the data afterward.

Source description information is easier to find in the catalog than in the source itself. Also, it helps other researchers to use the descriptive information the way it is found in the catalog at the repository where you found the source.

Comments on your strategies, questions, discrepancies, and analysis. Research logs are also a good place to write your strategies and explain why you are searching certain sources. Explain what you want to find, why, and how you hope to find it. Also write questions about the family, or mention conflicting data. When a chain of sources are needed to reach a conclusion, use the research log to write an analysis explaining your findings.

After the search...will be continued in the next blog.