Haven’t I Seen You Before?

It can be fun to follow a genealogy lead online and begin gathering facts and downloading documents as fast as you find them.

But beware. If you’re not well organized, you may discover that the terrific documents you spent an hour downloading are documents you already had!

My Family Tree Research Secret Weapon

That’s why I like to keep my “cheat sheet” open whenever I’m looking at information.

My document tracker shows me what I have and what I'm missing in my family tree.

I have a spreadsheet I call my Document Tracker. It has one person on each line and columns for the types of documents or facts I collect. The columns include birth, baptism, marriage, immigration, death, censuses, military, and more.

Whenever I'm investigating someone, I take a glance at that person in my alphabetical spreadsheet. Instantly I know what I have and what I need to find. No more wasted or duplicated effort.

To be thorough, I save the image of a census document and name it for the head of household and the year (e.g., IamarinoPietro1940.jpg). Then in my family tree software I attach it to each member of the household. Finally, I note it on each person’s line in my Document Tracker spreadsheet.

Now I can see which census years I've found for a father and each of his children as they move on to their own households.

This spreadsheet also helps you see what is missing for anyone in your family tree, such as the 1920 and 1940 census, or a World War II draft registration card.

Use your document tracker to focus on exactly what you need to locate. Think how much that will improve your productivity and fortify your family tree.

How Is That Possible?

They say the "unexamined life is not worth living". I say the "unexamined family tree is not worth publishing"!

Check Your Facts

Occasionally you need to analyze your family tree to see if anything looks illogical. Your family tree software may alert you if you’ve entered facts that are impossible, such as a woman giving birth when she’s a little girl or after she’s dead. But it won't alert you if your facts show a person living in two different states at the same time.

See why I think Family Tree Analyzer may be perfect for you.

Don't leave impossible facts in your family tree.

A common name in my family,
but 2 with the same birth date?

Recently I was adding census data to my family tree. One set of facts said the wife came to America two years before her daughter.

If this were true, it would mean she left her infant daughter in Italy, came to join her husband in America, and didn’t send for her baby for another two years.

That's highly unlikely and can only be proved or disproved by finding the mother and daughter’s immigration records.

These types of logic errors are what I frequently find in other people’s family trees—a big reason why I never accept someone else's research without seeing the documentation. Many times, these errors are difficult to spot and difficult to solve.

I like to put a bookmark on people with a logic error so I can quickly see where more investigation is needed.

See what type of reporting features your software may have. Whatever tools you can use, your tree will benefit from a logic scrubbing.

Where Did I Find This?

A Lack of Sources Can Ruin Your Tree

To give credibility to your genealogy facts and make your family tree stronger, you need good annotation.

Describe the source of each bit of information well enough that anyone can retrace your steps and find the same information. That includes:

• Name
• Birth date
• Birth place
• Marriage date
• Death date
• Death place
• and more.

For example, if you haven't found a ship manifest documenting a person’s immigration to America, but the 1920 census states that they arrived in 1905, be sure to cite the 1920 census as the source of that tidbit.

It's clear that the 1920 census is not as reliable as an actual ship manifest when it comes to immigration, but at least we know where that data point came from.

Written proof is more trustworthy than a family story passed down to you.

Myth destroyed. Not our uncle after all!

This seems like a good place to tell my passed-down family story that turned out to be 100% false. My in-laws fully believed they were descended from the brother of the captain of the Titanic.

I met Grandmother Lillian who told the story of being Captain Smith’s brother’s daughter. She was ashamed of the fact that her uncle lost so many lives at sea. It clearly pained her.

The problem is Captain Edward Smith had no brothers. He had a half-sister, but there were no other Smith boys in his family. How could Grandmother Lillian be so wrong?

I decided to see if Grandmother Lillian’s father was Captain Smith’s first cousin rather than his brother. Unfortunately, this was another dead end. No Smith boys.

This story illustrates how much you need to show exactly where your facts came from. Captain Smith’s would-be niece is no longer alive, so we can’t ask her why she believed he was her uncle. Without proof, we’ve got nothing.

Think about this: Would you want to grab someone else’s family tree and attach it to your own when a goof like this calls their entire tree into question?

Do your due diligence. Cite your sources. Here's a great reference on citing sources from FamilySearch.org.