Family Historian User Group

In some of my books, the authors advise to stop every now and again to review what you have already gathered.

Ancestry has introduced a new batch of images from US City Directories.

To keep track of this data I had experimented a while ago with putting the transcriptions of the entries in an Excel spreadsheet as well as recording them in Family Historian. This allows you to see at a glance when addresses change, what years are missing, and so on.

While working on a particularly thorny problem, I also added lines for the Census records I had found (or not) and for events which were mentioned in other records (residences listed in passenger lists, date of immigration or naturalization from Census records, etc.). I'm not particularly worried about printing these out right now, so I'm color-coding the lines: blue for information I've calculated or brought in from other sources, yellow for indexes of City Directories (someone else's transcription), No Color for entries where an image of the City Directory is available (my own transcription), and green for my transcriptions of census records.

Having finally gotten the spreadsheet into a form that seemed to work, I decided to work on a few more key timelines.

Early on in my research I had found a website with an index record for the Naturalization of one of my husband's great-grandfathers. It said 'Naturalization date not shown'.

How could I find out the date?

The clues: he was naturalized sometime between 1882/3 (dates given in the census for his date of entry for the US) and 1900 (when he is shown as Na, a naturalized citizen). He would not be in the 1880 Census because he was not in the country yet (I searched anyway to make sure) and the 1890 Census would be no help because most of it was burned.

I had recorded the data but had not followed up on it because the papers were filed in a local county court and it isn't something easy to research from the other side of the country. (I assumed that if I hired/asked anyone to look up the records for me, I would need the year he was naturalized.)

However, while assembling the updated timeline for him, I realized that I did have the address for his residence in that index record. Combining that with the evidence from the City Directories, I can now narrow down the window to around 1890 +/- 1 year.

Sometimes the answers to your questions are sitting right there in the heap of evidence you have already gathered.

So I too recommend reviewing your prior work before you set off to tackle an entire new collection of records, and after you've gathered your new evidence.

You never know what you might find.

Jan

ID:3372

Thanks Jan, some good ideas there.

I have found it's really useful to review all your data regularly, because as your knowledge grows, you can some times see things you missed the first time around.

The first time you see things, you don't always recognize the significance.

I've also created a spreadsheet to make a list of research questions.

Some of my husband's family went back to England. But we didn't know when they returned or where they went afterwards. So one obvious question was 'when did the family return to England?'

The answer turned up in one of the passenger lists.

Passenger lists ask if people have been in the US before, and on the second entry, it says clearly that he was in the US from 1898-1904.

That's a pointer for where to look in the lists of passengers incoming to the US.

I didn't notice it when I gathered that evidence because I was too busy looking at the fields that would indicate this was the right relative.

It's easy to miss things, because there can be a LOT of information in one record, and it's too much to take in all at one time.

If other people have similar experiences, I'd love to hear about them here -- I've learned a lot from other people's case studies.

Jan