7 Ways to Get the Most from Genealogy Documents (Part 2 of 2)

In this article and last week's, we look at 7 methods to help you get the most value from genealogy documents.

Last week's article began a discussion of 7 ways to squeeze the goods out of genealogy documents. That article covers the first 3 ways. Here are the other 4.

4. Translation Tools

One of my pet peeves is people who won't even try to figure out what a foreign-language vital record has to say. I guarantee you can stare at the document for a while and spot the names and numbers. As long as the foreign language uses the same letters as your alphabet, you can find names among the other words. It's just recognizing shapes.

FamilySearch.org has resources to help you with genealogy documents in another language. Go to their Wiki, choose the country you need, and find a list of genealogical words. Pay close attention to the words for numbers, as you may find them written in longhand, not numerals. Learn the word for each month. Browse the words for relationships, like father, mother, grandparent, and so on. The help you need is there.

I spend all my time up to my eyeballs in Italian vital records. When I first started viewing them, I didn't know how they worked. But there is always a format that they follow (see 5. Templates below). The more documents you view, the easier it gets.

I keep a bookmark for FamilySearch's Latin genealogical word list. While I've gotten comfortable with Latin numbers and months, I still need a little help now and then. It's good to be able to double-check yourself.

Google Translate is one of my most-used genealogy tools. Some documents may have an extra paragraph that doesn't fit the usual format. You can type the letters you think you see and find out what it means.

If you have a typewritten foreign document, use an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool. Clean up any obvious errors, then copy and paste the text into Google Translate. (I love to use OCR on obituaries so I can put the text right into my family tree.)

One free resource shows you the key genealogy words in another language. Another gives you a proper translation.

5. Templates

Different types of documents follow a specific pattern. That pattern can change over time, but there is a pattern. Understanding the layout of a document helps make sure that:

• you know where to look, and
• you don't overlook anything important.

For instance, each census record has a set format, and the exact questions vary from census to census. You can download blank, clean, easy-to-read forms from FamilySearch.org. Use them to make your research easier. Search for "Genealogy Research Forms" and see all that's there. These clean forms can show you exactly what information the form contains. They have blank ship manifests (which changed often), U.S. draft registration forms, Canadian and British census forms, and much more. Take advantage!

I've dissected Italian vital records in past articles. Maybe I'll create clean templates to help my fellow researchers understand what's where.

6. Safeguarding

Documents are beyond crucial to our family tree research. Anything that valuable deserves protection. Genealogy is a hobby we enjoy for years, so our findings move from computer to computer and house to house. We must take the necessary steps to safeguard our genealogy treasures. Make preservation a habit.

I work on my family tree every day. Here's my basic routine.

• Make a family tree file backup every few hours.
• At the end of the day, export a GEDCOM file and run a full backup.
• Store my final backup, GEDCOM, and a copy of the Family Tree Maker file in the cloud (OneDrive).
• Upload my GEDCOM to Geneanet.org. (This site can put your tree in front of a more international audience.)
• The next morning, sync my FTM file with my Ancestry.com tree.
• On Sunday morning, back up the week's files, including any new documents, to 2 external hard drives.

For more detail, and to figure out your own genealogy safeguarding plan, see:

• A Safety Net for Reckless Family Tree Building
• It's Time to Organize All Your Family Photos
• Quick and Easy Family Tree Backup Routine

7. Find Every Document

Isn't it great how new record collections come online all the time? When all my ancestors' Italian vital records came online on the Antenati site, it opened the floodgates. That's why my family tree has 81,601 people! And I couldn't be happier that the New York City Municipal Archives went online. Almost all my family lived there.

This year I'm filling in source citations in my family tree to make it valuable to other researchers. When I follow up on someone in the United States, I usually find more information than there was before. Now I can see their Pennsylvania birth and death records. I can download their New York City marriage record. Each new document can open the door to more relatives.

I love having a Newspapers.com subscription for obituaries and marriage announcements. These are a big help for people in my tree who were dead ends. Now I know who they married and which kids they had. And the grandchildren in the obit may be my DNA matches. The new information leads to more and more facts for my family tree.

Make it part of your research plan to revisit the dead ends in your family tree once in a while. You never know when a new document will come online and give you the answers you were missing. Keep trying to find every piece of the paper trail for each person.

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Genealogy documents are the cornerstone of our family tree research. My grandparents had so little to tell us about their parents. And they said nothing at all about their grandparents. So many details are lost in time. (Now I'm picturing Rutger Hauer in "Bladerunner" saying, "like tears in rain".) It's documents that let us capture the forgotten tidbits of our family history. Get all you can from them and preserve it all for future generations.

7 Ways to Get the Most from Genealogy Documents (Part 1 of 2)

Don't miss out on the full value of genealogy documents. Here are 7 ways to get the most from the documents you want for your family tree.

I'm still plugging away at my source citations project. Each day I add citations for 70–100 of the Italian nationals in my family tree. Working on source citations makes it obvious how important genealogy documents are to family tree research. I have so many people in my tree whose existence would be unknown if I didn't have this one document image.

Let me share with you 7 ways you can get the most value from each genealogy document you discover.

1. File Naming and Storage

If you're downloading document images you find online (I hope you are), you must make sure you can find them again. Everyone has their own preference about document file naming. Whatever you choose to do, do it with consistency. Then you'll have no doubt where to find a particular document.

I've detailed my file-naming and folder storage system in "3 Simple Rules for Managing Your Digital Genealogy Documents". I know lots of people have separate folders for individual families. For me, that'd be impossible. My family tree has 81,500 people and thousands of families. And what happens with Grandma? Is she stored under her father's last name and excluded from the folder for her husband's last name? Do I put a copy of her censuses under both names? It makes no sense to me.

The vast majority of my document image files are vital records. I name these for the person who is the primary subject. That's the baby on a birth record, the decedent on a death record, the groom and bride on a marriage record. I name the files last-name-first so they're easy to sort and find. When I name a file for a female, she always always always goes by her maiden name. The only time this is tricky is when a widowed woman is the head of household on a census form. In those cases, I'll use both last names, as in OrsariSarracinoGiuseppa1920. This is a 1920 census record for Giuseppa Orsari, widow, and her Sarracino children.

When you're choosing a file-naming/folder-naming process to follow, think it through. Let's say you don't name your files last-name-first. If you need John Taylor's documents, how many hundreds of John files will you have to pore over to find the right one? There are Johns, John Anthonys, John Peters, John Philips…that Taylor could be anywhere.

Find a solution that works best with the way you use your genealogy documents.

With a logical filing system in place, any genealogy document is easy to find for use in your family tree research.

2. Source Citations

Why create source citations? Imagine you're searching online for a distant cousin whose family tree might help you. You find one, and their tree has tons of details that are new to you. But not one fact has a source citation.

You're left to wonder, where did they get this date? Is that her maiden name? Did he die in another country? Without source citations, you have no solid reason to believe any detail is correct.

Recently, I heard from someone through Ancestry.com. It may be the first time I've ever heard from another Sarracino descendant. (That's my grandmother's maiden name.) Unfortunately, a lack of pre-1861 records from their town means I can't find our connection. But I'm happy to share what I do know.

He found his relatives in my family tree and asked me where those names and dates came from. Right away, I added the missing source citations for everyone in his branch. I synced my Family Tree Maker file with my Ancestry tree and pointed him to it. I told him he could view the profile page for any person and see a list of citations in the center column. For any citation, he would find a clickable link to the web page where he could see the vital record for himself.

That's exactly the type of proof someone needs to believe your genealogy work is valid. Plus, there will be times when you need to return to a document online. What if the version you downloaded got lost or corrupted? Say you found out that a cousin lived in your grandparents' apartment building. You'd need to return to the census to look for the cousin on the next page. If you didn't add a citation, how easily could you return to the source?

Source citations have tremendous value. For tips on following a source citation routine, see "These Steps Make Your Family Tree Much More Valuable".

3. Digitization

I've lived at a keyboard since I bought my genuine IBM PC in 1985. Of course all my stuff is digital! I'm not one of those genealogists with binders full of paper reproductions. I can't even imagine a binder for each family. (Again, I have thousands of families.) I have a few noteworthy paper-based family tree projects, but that's it:

• How to Create a 'Book of Life' for Your Relatives
• Make Your Own 'Elder Scroll'
• 5+ Ways to Share Your Tree with Family

I have only a small number of paper vital records that are not online. My grandfather's 1992 death certificate. My great grandfather's 1969 death certificate, and so on. These documents all fit in one folder. But of course I need to have an image of these documents in my family tree and as part of my computer backup.

That's why I digitized each paper-only document to make sure I never lose it. To see how simple this routine can be, read "How to Make Your Family Tree Fireproof!"

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Have you ever heard the phrase "Pix or it didn't happen"? When it comes to genealogy, it's "Documents or it didn't happen". Take the time to:

• follow a file-naming and file-storage routine
• prove your work by citing your sources
• safeguard your work for posterity.

More people than you will care about your family tree. Make it the best you can.

There's so much to say about genealogy documents that this article got quite long. Please come back next week and I'll wrap up the rest of the 7 Ways.

Free Tool Finds Details You'll Want to Fix

Quality control for your family tree includes being consistent in how you record facts.

Consistency is so important to me. That was true when I wrote code for web pages, and it's true now that my family tree is my full-time work.

Recently I discovered an inconsistency in my family tree. For months now, I've been working my way through a long, long list of people in my tree with no source citations. Saturday was my most productive day ever. I completed the source citations for 110 people!

During the citation process, I noticed the inconsistency. Years ago when adding baptisms to my family tree, I recorded only the date and town. After visiting these places, I started adding the name and address of the church, too. (I found a handy website that lets you look up the names and addresses of churches in any town in Italy.)

Whenever I notice one of my early baptism facts—one without a church name and address—I fill it in and cite my source. But I'm sure I've missed plenty. I wish there were an easy way to find every baptism fact that's missing a church name.

Once again, it's Family Tree Analyzer to the rescue! Using this free tool, I can:

• Open my latest GEDCOM file
• Click the Facts tab
• Select all 7 Relationship Types
• Select only the Baptism fact
• Click the button marked Show only the selected Facts for Individuals

This opens a new window that looks like a spreadsheet. It contains only those people with a Baptism fact. (In my case, that 23,077 people.) I can click the top of the Location column to sort the results in alphabetical order.

One of the churches I discovered late in my research is in Santa Paolina. This list shows 700 baptism entries for Santa Paolina that are missing the church name. I'm afraid to count how many church names are missing for the first town I documented long ago: Baselice. There are tons of them! I can also check which Marriage facts don't use a church name.

It's a big job, but I'm glad to have a way to locate and fix them all. I want that consistency for my family tree.

How else can we use Family Tree Analyzer's Facts report? Here are 3 ideas.

One report in a free family tree program is perfect for finding and fixing your less-than-perfect early genealogy work.

1. Pin Down a Specific Oversight

Lots of times a birth record tells you the father and mother's occupation, and I like to add that fact to my family tree. But I worry that I've forgotten to add the baby's birth citation to the parents' occupations.

Using the Facts report in Family Tree Analyzer, I view Occupation facts only. Then I can sort them by the Num Sources column. The number of occupations with 0 sources is staggering!

I can also sort the Occupations by the Comment column. This shows me a ton of farmers and laborers among my Italian relatives. Can you spot any occupation trends among your ancestors? Every dentist in my tree is one of my husband's relatives from Hawaii. I'm surprised to find only 5 miners in my tree, but I have a decent number of railroad workers.

I get a kick out of the more specialized occupations I've found in the U.S. censuses:

• hop picker at the Wigrich Hop Ranch
• bacon packer in a packing house
• chemist at a steel mill
• bottle washer for a soft beverage company
• garters maker
• chick sexer (I have two!)

What are the most unusual occupations you've recorded in your family tree?

2. Get Rid of Early Variations

Over time I developed consistent wording to use on Emigration and Immigration facts. In the description field of an Emigration fact, I type, "Left for [city name] on the [ship name]." In the description field of the Immigration fact, I type, "Arrived [with family members] to join [family member] at [address]."

But I wasn't using that format from day one of building my family tree. Family Tree Analyzer can show me all Emigration and Immigration facts. It's easy to spot the inconsistencies this way. I found only one Emigration fact that had no description at all—the rest follow the right format.

As for Immigration facts, when I sort them by the Comment column, I find:

• 2 entries with a typo (Arrive instead of Arrived)
• a lot of entries following my original format ("Arrived aboard the [ship name]")
• a small number of entries that cite a ship manifest but have no description at all

These are all items I can fix. The number is small because I completed all my immigration source citations long ago.

3. Remove Unwanted Facts

I used to find it interesting that draft cards and ship manifests stated a person's height and weight. When I view all the Height facts in my tree, I find only 7. And one is an obvious error (my cousin Bella was not 11 inches tall at birth). I've removed these unreliable, and often varying, sources of height from my family tree. Only 2 people in my tree had a Weight fact, and one was weight at birth. I've deleted them both.

There's a fact type called Medical Condition that I used random in the past, but only 13 times. Some of the 13 are details about the cause of death, and one mentions my great uncle's artificial eye. But most of the others make no sense in this category. I can fix these easily.

I also recorded 8 phone numbers in the Phone Number category. Two are for dead men, two are Italian phone numbers for cousins I've never met, and the rest are for people I'll never call. I'm sure that years ago I was so excited to find these pieces of information online that I recorded them. Now I'm going to delete them. Okay, I'm saving one phone number, but not in my family tree. I'm putting it in my iCloud contact list.

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If you've been working on your family tree for a while, I'm sure you've formed opinions on how you want to save details. And I'm sure your style has evolved over time. Spend a day using the Facts report in Family Tree Analyzer to bring your old work up to speed. Your consistency makes your family tree—your legacy—more professional.

For more help with family tree consistency:

• How to Batch Process Your Genealogy Documents
• Consistency Makes Your Family Tree More Professional
• The Basics of a Well-Crafted Family Tree
• Make Consistency King in Your Family Tree