Genealogy Em

When I start researching a new place, the geography is one of the first things I look into. I find that the more I know about an area's geography, the easier it is for me to verify records. Until recently, I never realized how important it is to understand how the population of a community varied over time. Im not just talking about when the area was settled, but more so how the demographics shifted every 5 or 10 years.  What can be learned? There are many things that can be learned from studying the geographic history of a region, but I only plan to focus on the four main ones. 1. Border changes Over time the borders of parishes, communities, counties, and even countries are subject to change. These changing borders can make it confusing to tell if you have the right person in every record. What I like to do is save a few different maps showing the borders so that I can quickly reference them. I also like to draw a rough sketch of the map on a post-it note and plot out the communi

At one point or another every genealogist is bound to hit a brick wall. I previously wrote about 7 brick wall busting strategies. These strategies have helped me greatly, but what has helped me the most is understanding how to properly conduct a search. If you want to know if you really have hit a brick wall, its time to start looking at if your behaviours are the cause.  1. Your filling in too much information When we use a site such as Ancestry, FamilySearch, etc. we are met with these digital forms of boxes. As tempting as it is to fill in everything you know, dont do it. Stop and think about what you want to find. Ask yourself what the goal of the conducting the search is. Once you know what it is you want to find, employ the degrees of freedom approach. I previously wrote two posts ( here  and  here ) explaining how to use this method.   2. Your search is too specific When searching it is easy to want to enter the specific BMD information, however this often is too limiting. In

When it comes to research, we encounter many different languages that we dont understand. If your just starting out that might mean its technical terminology. For more experienced genealogists this might mean performing research in a foreign language. Much like starting genealogy, delving into foreign research can seem like a daunting and confusing task. To date I have conducted research in English, French, Latin, and Gaelic. Each time I attempted a researching in a new language, I found myself becoming increasingly more comfortable and proficient.  Leverage Technology For languages that we have a vague familiarity with, it is much easier to being this journey. As someone who has deep roots in Quebec, I knew that it would only be a matter of time before I was forced to recall what I had attempted (and failed) to learn many years ago in school. Lucky for me, there is technology that can help bridge the language barrier.  Depending on what you are researching, you will realize that there

FAN club research is one of the most valuable types of research that a genealogist can perform. It can help breakdown brick walls and give you a better idea of what a person's life looked like. One of the main challenges we face when attempting this type of research is how we want to organize our information. In a previous post I explained how I use a network diagram to illustrate these relationships. Although this is a great way of interpreting the FAN club, it often lacks the space to properly record all of the information. I like to use a combination of a table and the network diagram.  How to Create the Table Sortable tables are a great way of displaying genealogical information in Excel. When they are created correctly, they allow you to quickly locate and/or group similar pieces of information. The tutorial on the Microsoft website provides a good walk through of the process.  Selecting the Headers The main focus of creating this table should be the headers. You want to sel

When it comes to sharing your family history, one of the first things that people ask to see is the family tree. Of course there are great online family tree builders (such as Ancestry, FMP, and My Heritage) but that often involves family members having to create their own account. Creating a free account on Ancestry can be quite frustrating (Im not even sure how I did that a decade ago...). There are many other reasons why someone may not want to share one of these online trees. For example, I have chosen not to because I explore many theories in my trees, I dont always keep them the most up to date with all my knowledge, I know some of my family members would struggle with the technology, and I still want to maintain a little privacy within my research. For all of those reasons I chose to go the more simple route and create an interactive tree in Powerpoint. (Yes I do realize that this is significantly more work than updating my tree! But I dont care!).  Why Powerpoint? I chose to us

I was first introduced to the idea of Googling my ancestors many years ago when I first began my research. Almost a decade ago Ancestry had a feature on the ancestor's profile that allowed you to have Ancestry conduct the Google search for you. I dont know when or why they got rid of this feature, but regardless it taught me a lot about how to use Google for genealogy. The pattern that this feature used when conducting searches was what made it so valuable. What Ancestry had managed to have this feature do was insert Google search operators around the information that you already had entered in your tree. When this is done correctly, you are left with a small handful of relevant results.  What are Google search operators? Google search operators are a set of characters that can be placed between and/or around your keywords. When used correctly, they can require or exclude certain terms from your results, restrict results to a specific type, limit a year range, etc. There are a wide