Family Historian User Group

Every now and again when I get stuck while doing research methodically, I do some wider 'one-name-study' searches to see what I can turn up. I am looking for ideas on how I can keep this information organized in case I need it later. (I usually keep it in a separate file until I have more evidence.)

For instance, I was searching the IGI by batch for all the KNOWLES entries in the village I am working on. If I select all the people and download them in one fell swoop, when I open them up in a new Family Historian file, I'll have each child with their parents' names as a separate family. The village is small enough that it's very likely all the children of Thomas Knowles and his wife Sarah are children of the same Thomas and Sarah Knowles, all the children of Thomas Knowles and his wife Jane children of the same Thomas and Jane Knowles, etc. What is the most efficient way of merging so that they all appear as the same family in FH? Despite trying to be careful, I somehow attached the Thomas married to Jane into the Thomas and Sarah family, thus making the later Thomas the father of his own grandfather. (Perhaps I should not work on FH at the same time we are watching Doctor Who....)

In another search, I captured from FreeBMD all the KNOWLES births from the same registration area as my family of interest. Some of them may be entirely unrelated, but I feel it is useful to keep an eye on them so that I don't get the sound-alikes mixed up with 'my own' KNOWLES family.

Do you have any tips and / or warnings for the unwary newbie?

Jan

ID:2525

IGI data can be a bit of a pest, as sorting out the multiple duplicate families can be a bit tricky. Last time I did some I opened one copy and made a new file in FH and used the tree drawing add method to add all the children to the right parents. The trouble with trying to use the IGI file directly in my case was there were 3 families with 11,9,7 children respectively, so too many duplicate parents to make the task manageable.

You can cut and paste between the two copies of the program for the names and dates if you want and putting on Auto-source before you start gets everything sorted.

I have several 'extra' files which I use with FH, for extracted data and I tend to move it over as I need it, using Flags on the extra files, to show data which has been moved to the main file.

For an update on the saga of 'Jan's search of the IGI by batch':

I decided to start over and download all the marriages in one file and all the christenings in another file, and then to merge the two files into one 'Knowles-IGI' file. (These are only the records extracted from marriage or christening records, not user-submitted ones.)

When I looked at the matches suggested by Family Historian, the best score I got for any match was a 50. I looked the Thomas-Jane marriage and the children whose christening records had Thomas and Jane as parents, and discovered that the christenings were as late as 17 years after the marriage date. (Marriage 1791, christenings in 180x). This seemed odd.

I might not be surprised to find a youngest child in a family born seventeen years after the marriage (I was 20 years younger than my mom, but I am adopted), I would not expect to find multiple siblings born that late and no siblings before them.

So with no match with a score greater than 50, I unmatched everyone, and just added the individuals whose information came from the marriage records.

I do like how FH displays the proposed changes for the merges -- my only regret is that I do not have a bigger monitor so I can make that three-column display bigger.

Anyway, this just shows (again) how genealogy-by-jigsaw and working forwards from the past are not a good plan.

Jan

Don't forget that you're looking at the date of baptism, not birth. In my own family I have documented evidence of 'children' being baptised in their mid teens, and two or three children baptised at the same time (was there a discount for quantity?)

Good point -- I had not considered that.

Some of the books I've read for newbie genealogists advise the reader to use events from one's own life as guides to what might happen elsewhere. If future genealogists saw my birth registration date and the date I was confirmed (in my teens), and mistook it for a infant's baptism date, they too might decide they were looking at the records of two different people.

Jan