Using Care When Shaking Your Leaves

I don't know about you, but I get just a bit peeved each time I see one of Ancestry.com's television commercials. This one from 2009 is not as simplistic as many of the current TV ads, but it is still misleading.

Believe me, it's not that simple! I have been using Ancestry.com since 2002, and while it has made my research so much easier than it was for my Grand Aunt Helen (Newton) Beers in the 1940s, one person's error can be replicated in a dozen other family trees as quickly as select, review, and save.

While it is possible occasionally to find a well-sourced tree with photos and stories, I have only had that happen perhaps twice for the hundreds of surnames I have researched.

Advertisements appealing to specific ethnicities
The  "Born A Slave...Died a Businessman" ad (2011) geared for the African American community spawned a host a negative reactions, from discussions on racism to extreme parodies. One man asked a great question...

"If your ancestor had died a slave would you have been any less proud?" 

Specializing in African-American ancestry poses some unique challenges in digging up ancestral roots. The parodies all tend to focus on the obviousness of African slavery...but how many would naturally look for their Black ancestors as land holding Free Persons of Color during the Colonial period? It appears that the bias slants toward the second wave of slave importation during the Antebellum period. But what about all those who came before?

Shaking leaves on your family tree

Without getting into a debate on African-American history, allow me to explain why genealogists--researching ancestors of any nationality and ethnicity--must use care when shaking the leaves of the family tree.

As do some genealogists, I have several places where I have family trees posted:

1. Family Tree Heritage Deluxe (my first family tree software used to make a working model to test hypotheses),
2. MyHeritage.com (used to make living descendant connections),
3. Ancestry.com (used to make initial document connections to names in my tree and make living descendant connections), and
4. Legacy 7.5 (the software I'm using to format a more professional tree).

You might start by roughing out your tree with just the names you find in a sourced pedigree, adding documents as you go. But if you continue long enough in this manner, you may eventually wind up with a lot of unproven relationships, and ultimately, some completely wrong family connections as did several researchers attempting to make a connection to my husband's African-American family tree.

Somewhere, something went terribly wrong! The hypothesized progenitors were white slave owners of the same surname...the main problem being that my husband's ancestors had Christian names before coming to America, and they were not named for their masters. To add insult to injury, these white forerunners weren't even from the same locality. The only thing connecting them was a surname, and a list of several similar given names of children.

Even if you don't hold fast to some fantastic connection that seems too good to be true, you may (as I have) come across a birth date (or other vital statistic) which is completely unsupported. Years later you may find it and ask yourself, Now how did I come up with that date? 

When I realized that I had placed it in my tree, unsourced, from a published genealogy, I immediately contacted the author of the tree and asked him,

"What was the general rule of thumb you used to determine approximate years of birth when no age was mentioned in the marriage bond, no will was left, and no age mentioned in the probate records?"

The response was,

"Absent any other information, I assumed a husband a wife, married at about 21, and then children spaced about 1 1/2 to 2 years apart."

Available on Amazon.com

The Genealogical Proof Standard
So, now I take up the task of re-evaluating the evidence to see if I might be able to make a more correct estimation based upon facts. The only way to ensure accuracy is to follow the five steps of the genealogical proof standard.

Family Search offers a free audio lesson, complete with course handout, on this subject by Presenter Christine Rose, author of The Genealogical Proof Standard: Building A Solid Case.
Below are the five guidelines she outlines in her book and in this audio lesson:

1. Conduct a reasonably exhaustive search.
2. Complete, accurate source citation.
3. Analyze & correlate information to assess its quality as evidence.
4. Resolve conflicts caused by contradictory pieces of evidence.
5. Arrive at a soundly reasoned, coherently written conclusion.

As Ms. Rose states, it is so easy to overlook this last part. We must keep a written research record of what hypotheses we make along the way where apparently conflicting evidence exists, and discuss what records we used to prove or disprove, and the results of the search. 

If I had done this in my working model when I first started, I wouldn't now be undertaking the monumental  task of re-evaluation!

Reading of MAAGI and Sharpening My Own Focus

I've been a follower of my good friend and distant cousin-in-law's gen blog for several years now;  but yesterday, Yvette Porter Moore posted to her newly formatted blog, The Ancestors Have Spoken because of a challenge she had received while attending the first Mid-Western African American Genealogy Institute in St. Louis, Missouri.

As I read of how she connected with a piece of her adopted father's past, my mood shifted to melancholy and I began thinking about my platform....and my Daddy. My dad died of metastatic optic melanoma in 2004. During his four-year battle, we enjoyed many times when we could just talk about the things on our hearts. We covered everything from writing, photography & painting to the Bible.

After his death, I inherited his photograph studies of trees, sky, water, rocks and the like. Some are prints, but there were also volumes and volumes of 35 mm slides. So yesterday I pulled that tote from my family archive, which is now housed within an armoire  kept in my office.

A Ride Along the Delaware

I sat down in the living room with the tote setting on the floor before me, and removed the black lid to find a stack of black and white photos right on top. As I sifted through them, I came across a color photo of my grandparents, Mark & Abby Silverman, at the wishing well...a photo I had searched for quite unsuccessfully some time before our move. But now, here it is.

The black and whites were from a study Dad had done on trees and water combined. He was a professional photographer and painter, and had taught art for over twenty years. How I remember going with him and Mom on family outings (I'm an only child), and having to wait for him to get just the right lighting and exposure on some of these photos! Trees had always been a favorite subject of my own, and as a young writing student, I had written several poems about trees.

And so, as I thought about my genealogy platform in light of working on my certification portfolio for the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG), I began to think about my professional presence. I chatted online and emailed Thomas MacEntee of High-Definition Genealogy (and probably more well known for his platform on GeneaBloggers) this week regarding establishing service fees and contractual releases for client work, and he was most helpful!

As I looked at my business cards, I began to think about letterhead, of all things. And even those include the theme of trees. One of the favorite poems Mom used to recite to me when I was a child was Joyce Kilmer's poem, Trees:

I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree....

And so trees it is...and black and white to fit with the platform of cross-cultural studies. The photo in this blog header was taken by my Dad, Richard A. Newton, somewhere in New York State, sometime between the 1960s to the 1980s. And so, I've come full circle once again.

Thanks, Dad, for your love of trees....

4 Tips For Proving Your Family Tree

BCG Kinship Determination Project

Last week I revealed the start of a new phase in my genealogical endeavors...BCG Certification. This is a one year project whereby I assemble seven parts of a portfolio, and submit it to be judged for professional credentials. My deadline for submission is 

May 30, 2014.

I suppose some or even most people might prepare each section of the portfolio consecutively: 

1. Genealogist's Code
2. Background Resume
3. BCG Supplied Document Work
4. Applicant Supplied Document Work
5. Research Report Prepared for a Client
6. Case Study: Conflicting or Indirect Evidence
7. Kinship-Determination Project.

However, the combination of management multi-tasking skills and ADHD make for the perfect solution of thinking and planning for all seven categories at once, while making strides on the one part of the process I believe to be most demanding and time consuming...the kinship-determination project.

Tip #1: Organize, organize, organize

Since I've been compiling sources for my husband's family tree since 2005 and have relocated several times during that period, I have tried to (at least I thought I did) file my documents carefully in binders by family groups. But when I began checking each fact in my family tree database, I discovered that not every document was in its proper place. So, the first tip is to organize all paper documents according to family groups as soon as you print them. This saves you from the hassle of hunting them up and wasting precious time on your project.

Tip #2: Scan, upload & attach

Okay...so you've organized all those photocopies and printed documents into your paper file system. Now what?! The next thing you should do is scan existing paper documents, or download digital documents; and then, upload & attach them to the individuals in your family tree database. This makes life so much easier when working on your proofs.

Tip #3: Make research notes

Alright. Everything is now in its proper place. Now what? What do you do with all those vital records, census sheets, land deeds, wills and probate documents now that they're attached? Is that it? Not quite. The next step is to abstract & analyze the facts. Do your documents really prove your conclusions? I discovered that I had written down a date of death for one ancestor, but because I didn't make any notes at the time I entered the data, I couldn't remember how I came to that conclusion. And after looking at all the records I had in front of me, there were still some missing pieces to the proof puzzle. A good place to put these notes is in the research notes section for that individual in your database. 

Tip #4: Enter complete source info

There's not much worse than trying to remember where you got that fact seven or ten years ago! While my usual practice is to put printed documents in a sleeve protector affixed with a label, including: 

• Author(s)
• Title
• Publisher, place & date
• Volume & page number
• Repository
• Date found

...there have been instances where I was in a hurry, as when printing obituaries from microfilm at a library when on vacation.... In some of those cases I may have put all the pages into an envelope marked with some crude penciled-in notes, i.e. the reel #, newspaper & date...or maybe not...and later on, the more those documents got handled the more likely I was to lay them aside and forget about performing the steps above. Days, months or even years later I now find myself questioning:

Now why did I get this document? Where does it belong?

So, the best way to avoid trouble is to carefully write the bibliographic info onto the back of each document as soon as you print it, and then follow the above steps at your earliest convenience.

You may think you have a pretty well proven family tree, but if your relationships and events are not fully documented, abstracted, analyzed and sourced, you may run into problems down the branch!