Born on St Patrick's Day: Happy 115th Mary

They say that its good luck to be Irish, and that the luckiest of all are those who are born on St Patrick's Day. No doubt this is what was said the day that my great grandmother was born. However, her life was not necessarily filled with the good luck that the superstition had predicted. As much as she had a hard life, her life was also an "ordinary" one of a young British immigrant to Canada. Despite that, the simple life she led in youth was filled with fun. She embrace the changing times, new found freedoms, and innovations. Its the heirlooms from that chapter of her life that fascinate me the most because they show aside to her that none of my relatives knew - a woman who was happy. So today, I am going to share the side of her that one of those heirlooms tells. I have a small black autograph book that was hers.  At almost 100 years old, the book binding has all but disintegrated yet the leather cover is in near pristine condition and the partially bound pages are al...
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How to Make a FAN Club Table in Excel

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 select the best ones for filtering your information. For example, I have a notebook filled with the names of people who phoned after one of my ancestors passed away. I chose to enter these names into a table so I could take a more organized approach to identifying their relationships. When I built the table I wanted to have a way of putting the names back in the order they were in the book so I added a column for page number and line number. This also helped me locate the name in the book if I wanted to go back and check the spelling. I made another two columns to separate the first and last name. Then I added a column for the relationship type, and finally another one for my notes. 

I decided that the best way to approach the list of names was to alphabetize them based on last name, so I clicked on the header filter in that column and selected 'A-Z'. The reason that I wanted to do this was because I planned to start by using a city directory to identify the relationships. By having the names in alphabetical order it was much faster to go through the list as I could move through the directory in one direction as opposed to constantly flipping back and forth. Alphabetizing also allowed me to group the surnames together. The advantage in doing this is that I could see if my ancestor had close ties to one family. When I noticed this happening I knew that I probably needed to look deeper into those entries than I normally would. 

Colour Coding

If you know me, you know I find a way to colour code almost everything that I do (and my genealogical research is no exception!). I chose to use a minimal amount of colour coding in this table because the network diagram was fully colour coded. I opted to use colour to identify the entries that I had completed and to identify potential errors. When I had successfully established the nature of the relationship I shaded that row in a different colour than the rest of the table. For example, my table was white and the completed entries were light blue. For the names that I had trouble transcribing, I chose to colour the text red. This told me that if I couldnt find that name in the directory I should go back and look at the handwriting again. The odds were that I had just recorded the name incorrectly. 



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