Since then, I have moved computers twice. I have files all over the place. I have probably lost images of digitized source material due to hard drive failures and bad backups. I need to start over and organize things properly, and do fresh analysis while I'm about it.
I like to hear what others have found useful in their work, so please chime in if you feel like talking about the process. I'm writing this all out to clarify my thinking, and to help others who may be feeling muddled the same way I am.
When I first started out, despite reading several how-to books, I made all the classic beginners' mistakes, the kind all the how-to books and articles warn you about. I didn't know what I was doing. So I'm starting fresh, with FH5. I will look at my old files for reference, and copy things out of the notes and so on, but I'm not going to try merging any of the old GEDCOMs in to my main file.
What I want to establish is my workflow -- a standard method of handling any new source or bit of information that I discover -- which in this case means either a new acquisition, or an old source that I had mislaid, and am reviewing and putting in its proper organized place.
What I didn't understand when I started out is how to do family history research the way I was trained to handle data in graduate school. Now I see where I went wrong, so I want to reconcile or correlate good practice the way I was taught and good practice from the POV of genealogy and family history.
The process I did on paper was like this:
- Interview an informant
make a fresh transcription of the interview in a research journal
construct an index with paper slips and file under all the relevant facts that need to be indexed
write up the analysis in the research journal, with notes about the facts not directly found in that source on the facing page of the journal
make a list of things to talk about with the informant in the next session
As you can see, the process is source based. I was confused when I started out, because most of the software reviewed was lineage-based, and I didn't know how to relate that to the source-based process I had been taught. I was also frustrated by the lack of a good program to keep a research journal -- so much so, I am still considering going back to a paper-based system for that part of the process.
There are two major things about the paper system which, for me, were an advantage compared to working on a computer. The first was, since the index had to be constructed by hand, it forced you to look at everything word by word. (This was indeed the point of the system; it is used by one of my professors to build a lexicon of a language that doesn't have dictionaries yet.) Imagine having a computer program that would do anything you want, because whatever you wanted, you knew how to code it. That is the flexibility a paper system has; you are limited in the size of your paper and the physical amount of storage space you have, but if you need to have a particular kind of thing indexed, like a street address, you just do it.
The second is, the items which are indexed together are filed together, but they are not bound together in the same way they would be if you attached information to a person in a lineage-based program. If you discover that a source is bad, you can easily go through and pull out all the index references to that source and purge it from the database. If you have a bad source in FH, sure, you can run a query and see what citations are out there. But also this --
Because of your index, you have a means for pulling out all of the information which talks about a person named John Kelly. But it doesn't force you, when you add a source to your index, to choose WHICH John Kelly it belongs to. The index slip itself tells you what information about John Kelly is in that source. The conclusion about which John Kelly is which is written as a note against the source in your research journal, where it belongs.
As you discover which sources belong to the different John Kellys, You might decide to separate all the different John Kelly index slips into separate sub-sections in your index file, as you would if you wrote a book about the family, but if you go wrong, it is easy to take the source you've had a problem about and transfer it to the proper place (which could be a 'we still don't know which John Kelly this is' subsection). It is much more fluid than what would happen in FH, because none of the people are permanently "merged".
I don't know of any lineage-based program which is good at doing THAT part of the process.
So -- given that I am working on the computer these days -- what should the new workflow be?
- examine or collect a source
log what repository the source came from and when collected; if previous date of collection is unknown, go out and access it again, and log the date and time it was revisited, and what search was necessary to find it
transcribe the source and/or enter it into a source-based program
review the assertions / claims for analysis and make notes
identify research questions raised by this source that should be added to a research plan
add the source to Family Historian
- use Ancestral Sources when appropriate to aid in event creation
use the Auto-Source Citation feature in FH to add the information to the appropriate people
add flags in FH, or add people to any Named Lists
On the other hand, for analysis of the data itself, working by person has its advantages, too. So clearly I need to do both. Scrivener is good for writing out a biographical profile, and LibreOfficeCalc is good for building timelines.
What I'd like to do is establish a plan so that I work systematically, opening FH and AS and the other programs, choosing something to work on, and then working with that source in the same manner every time I handle it. Because the Ancestry "oh it's so easy!" way of collecting a source, banging it on your tree, and then going off down the next rabbit trail, just isn't going to cut it anymore. (Part of the process includes cleaning up and (in some cases) deleting my private trees from Ancestry.com -- I use them as semi-organized Shoeboxes, and they filled a gap when my computers were having difficulty and I wasn't able to use FH.)
During the last several years, I've come to understand better the POV of those of you who use one big file, but the problem still remains of what one does with the source material for which you haven't reached a conclusion about yet.
One other pressing need that I haven't dealt with -- a proper way to file my e-mail correspondence. I have used programs like Goldmine in the past, which are designed for salesmen to keep in contact with customers and vendors, and record sales leads. It seems an obvious kind of thing for researchers -- to be able to log correspondence and record requests, etc. I have seen paper checklists, but I haven't found a computer-based system which is designed for genealogists.
The toolbox:
- Family Historian5 (obviously)
Ancestral Sources
(to be added soon) GenQuiry
a source-based program like Evidentia, Clooz, or Custodian
GenSmarts
Scrivener and Scapple
possibly Evernote?
Firefox w/ Scrapbook add-on for screen grabs
LibreOffice (for spreadsheets, replacing Excel)
At the moment, the one thing I am really wanting to have on paper as well as in the computer: MAPS. One of the towns I am working on allows you to download the official tax maps with the property IDs on them. I have them on the computer, and can put them in a virtual binder in Scrivener, but it could be useful to print out all the maps I've collected in a binder so I can consult them separately. A paper map on a clipboard is cheaper than having a second monitor.
If there are particular things you've discovered that help with your workflow, or if you have advice about doing a review, please post them. Thanks!
