Genealogy Em

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 th...

Often Degrees of Freedom (D of F) is used when solving algebraic math problems, however I have found that it is a particularly useful way of searching for and analyzing records. In math terms D of F has the following generic formula: Number of Total Variables – Known Variables = D of F For genealogists the above formula applies when the number of variables is viewed as the types of information that are present in the record, and the number of known variables are the information that we know about the individual. Similar to a math problem, having more known variables than the total of variables results in an over parameterized problem. You will have conflicting information or potentially no results at all. This is one of the most common mistakes made when conducting a search because it is tempting to fill in all the boxes with what we know even if all that information has nothing to do with what we are looking for. On the other extreme is an unspecified search where there are more ...