12 November 2019

Work in Sprints to Strengthen Your Family Tree

If you work flat-out on only one task, you'll do it better and faster.

I started this blog almost 3 years ago with one idea. Encourage people to use business practices to make their genealogy research more professional. I think I've inspired a lot of you to treat your research more seriously.

Today let's look at a business practice that Information Technology (or IT) teams use. In a word: sprints.

You know what an athlete who runs a short distance at maximum speed is, right? A sprinter. A few years ago IT teams began using the term "sprints" to mean that they work together on one project for, say, 2 weeks. That's all they work on, giving it their full attention.

Sprint to the finish, keeping your focus on ONE genealogy task.
Sprint to the finish, keeping your focus on ONE genealogy task.

They find that removing all other distractions helps them do their best work on any one project. And this is true for us, too. Here's an example.

I keep a list of things I want to do to improve my family tree. I call it my "rainy-day genealogy list." Can you relate to any of these?
  • transcribe my taped interview of Mom and Dad
  • sort out my photos and add more to my family tree
  • review my old notebook of Ellis Island entries for people I need
  • review my brother's college genealogy paper for more facts from Grandpa
  • file away everything that's in my temporary "gen docs" folder
  • add details to all my ship manifest images
  • search for documents for all the people with partial birth and death dates
I started working on the last item this past weekend—and only that item. I'm treating it like a sprint, which means I'm giving it all my focus and working through it completely.

What I do is sort the list of people in my tree by birth date. My tree is 90% Italians from the 19th century, and I have vital records from their towns starting in mid-1809.

In one sitting, I went through everyone I'd marked as born in 1809 through 1814. I searched for their birth record. Some were born in another town, so I went online to find their birth records.

And with that total focus, I solved most of them. At least 2 or 3 times I found that a person in my tree with a missing birth date was really someone else in my tree with a birth date. I needed to merge them, and then everything fits.

Tackle the problem one chunk at a time until it's through.
Tackle the problem one chunk at a time until it's through.

I've done this in the past with another limited project. I wanted to add full details to each census record image in my family tree. I created a format to use, and went through every single census image in my family tree's media tab. It took more than one sitting, but I got it done. Now, if someone finds my census image on Ancestry, they can follow the link to the original document.

Do you ever sit down to work on your tree with no specific goal in mind? I'll bet you're more likely to get bored that way.

If, instead, you pick one goal to work on, and give it your full attention, you'll get energized. You'll feel excited that you're getting through that goal. You'll have to hold yourself back from all the other goals you know you can finish.

Now, make yourself a short list of limited goals you want to achieve for your family tree. They should be specific ("add a census sheet image to each member of the family"), not open-ended ("see if I'm descended from royalty"). Pick one goal and make a commitment. You're going to work only on that goal and see it through to completion.

If it helps you, set a deadline. But only do that if that's what you need to light a fire under yourself. Personally, I get energized by seeing myself work through the pile. When I progress through the years of people with missing birth dates, that is my inspiration. When I work through all my ship manifest images to add missing details, I'll get excited when the bottom of the list is in sight.

Do whatever works for you, but take it seriously. Think of yourself as that sprinter on the track. Give it all you've got and set your new personal best.

If genealogy is your passion, you can strengthen your work in sprints. Tackle that backlog of tasks so you can move on to new discoveries.

08 November 2019

Family Tree Disaster-Recovery Tips

When the worst happens, your obsession with thoroughness will pay off!

Nothing makes me more depressed or more angry than a computer problem. It could be a hardware upgrade, a software upgrade, or network issues. These problems make me scream and curse more than anything in the world.

I'm going through this depression and anger now because of my family tree.

My software, Family Tree Maker, announced an update to the program last May, so I pre-ordered it. I got the update in late September. My favorite thing about Family Tree Maker is being able to synchronize all my edits to my tree on Ancestry.com. I want my latest and greatest finds to be there for relatives and DNA matches to see.

When they launched the software update, there was a known problem with Ancestry.com. They said we could synchronize our trees with Ancestry…probably. But, if a sync failed, we shouldn't try again until we got the "All clear".

I did have a couple of successful syncs, but then it failed. So I waited. And waited. On November 6 the company issued a patch and said it was OK to sync.

It was pretty amazing that they could track the problem to one person.
It was pretty amazing that they could track the problem to one person.

Not for me. After struggling for a while, I started a chat with their support staff. Amazingly, they isolated the problem. My file got corrupted at one specific person in my large family tree. Their advice was to:
  • Delete this one person from my family tree on Ancestry.com
  • Download a new GEDCOM from my online tree (which was way out of date)
  • Restore my Family Tree Maker file from this GEDCOM
  • Attempt to synchronize again.
That worked. My desktop and online trees are once again synchronized. But now my tree has 22,420 people instead of 22,500 people.

I have to restore 80 missing people manually. And possibly a lot of individual facts. I'll do it with the help of the last GEDCOM I made from my Family Tree Maker file before this mess started.

The best tool for restoring the 80 missing people is the free program, Family Tree Analyzer. I can use it to open the last GEDCOM of my 22,500-person family tree. Then I can go to the Individuals tab and make sure it's sorted by the first column: IndividualID.

At the bottom of the list of individuals, are the most recent people I added before the crash. I will work my way up from the bottom, restoring the people and facts I've lost.

Having documentation and good tools can help you recover from a family tree disaster.
Having documentation and good tools can help you recover from a family tree disaster.

I'll re-sync my tree after I restore every 20-or-so people.

This will get me back up to my full amount of 22,500 people. But I am worried about individual facts I may be losing. Recently I've been finding and adding missing birth dates to people in my tree. But I didn't attach their document images. I have a feeling I'll have to start that project over.

I did download a synchronization failure report from Family Tree Maker. It's 62 pages long, showing recent additions, deletions, and changes. That may be helpful.

Earlier this week I was giddily finding death records for some of my 5th great grandparents. With that info, I was able to add several 6th great grandparents to my tree. But in my excitement, I didn't crop and add the death record image to the person in my tree. So I can't look at my folder of document images to re-create what's missing. (Sadly, I was planning on going back for those documents today!)

But there's a bright side. As I discovered the names of those 6th great grandparents, I added them to my grandparent chart. That means I can:
  • Look at the name of a recently added ancestor in Family Tree Analyzer who's my 6th great grandparent.
  • Find them in my grandparent chart. That'll tell me who they married and who is their child…the one who's my 5th great grandparent.
  • Find the death record again, and add it to the tree.
This mess raises a bunch of questions:
  • How many daily backups should I keep? I've been keeping 4 or 5, and I make a full backup after each work session. Maybe I'll keep a few more.
  • Do I need to keep a log of what I do during each session? I'm often doing one thing in particular. I may be tracking down missing birth or death records. Or cleaning up source citations. I could write that in a log.
  • Should I check for errors using Family Tree Analyzer more often, like weekly or monthly? I could do it on Sundays—my normal computer backup day. If nothing turns up after a few weeks, I may relax and do it monthly.
So what's the moral of this tale of woe?
  • Document what you're doing.
  • Track what you've found and what you were looking for.
  • Back up your file a lot!
This is my first family tree crisis, and I don't want it to happen again. Luckily, I'm in decent shape because of my digital "paper trail". I'm grateful for all my extra documentation steps.

05 November 2019

How a Research Timeline Helps You Spot Gaps and Problems

When you have very little to go on, a timeline can keep your genealogy research firmly on track.

I'm working on a family that's from a town that's new to me. I've never researched anyone in this place before. I'm starting this search with only a couple of undocumented facts.

What can I do to create an accurate, thorough sense of this family's history?

I started gathering documents for the husband and wife who had come to America from Italy. They were born in the 1860s.

I found their marriage document. Then I used their ages at that time to find their birth records. But the husband's birth record says he married a different woman on a particular date.

Your family tree software may provide a timeline of facts so far.
Your family tree software may provide a timeline of facts so far.

It's wonderful when they add that detail to a birth record. But this sure seemed like a problem. He married this other woman only one year before he married the woman I knew about—the mother of his children. Unless there was something sneaky going on, the first woman had to have died within a year of their marriage.

I had a hard time finding her death record. I found myself veering into the wrong years. (I still don't like how Family Search throws so much in one folder.) So I searched for and found the births of the 3 daughters who came to America with their mother.

When I did find a death record for the first wife, I misread the date! I wrote it down as 1908…ten years later than she should have died.

That was the moment I knew I needed a timeline. This isn't my usual style, but I renamed all the files I'd found to begin with the year. Now they're in my working folder sorted by date. Looking at the files names, I made a chronological list of the main event from each document. For example:
  • 1863 birth of Giovanni Marino
  • 1865 birth of Maria Viola (Giovanni and Maria are the couple who came to America.)
  • 1897 marriage of Giovanni Marino and Elena Russo (the mystery woman!)
  • 1898 marriage of Giovanni Marino and Maria Viola
  • 1899 birth of Giovanni and Maria's 1st daughter
  • 1901 birth of Giovanni and Maria's 2nd daughter
  • 1904 birth of Giovanni and Maria's 3rd daughter
  • 1905 ship manifest for Giovanni Marino going to New York
  • 1908 death of Elena Russo (That turned out to be the wrong date.)
  • 1911 ship manifest for Maria Viola and her 3 daughters following Giovanni to New York
With this timeline, I knew for sure the 1908 death of wife #1 needed an explanation. I'd already looked at her death record twice. I knew this was the same Elena Russo who married Giovanni Marino in 1897. She had the same parents and the same husband.

Discovering the facts out of order made it a little confusing. Who was this mystery woman?
Discovering the facts out of order made it a little confusing. Who was this mystery woman?

I decided to look for marriage banns for Giovanni and Maria in 1898. I found them, and they said wife #1 was dead. OK, so Giovanni wasn't a polygamist. I'm glad of that.

Only on my 3rd inspection of Elena's death record did I see my mistake. The year is 1898 (milleottocento novantotto) not 1908 (millenovecento otto). Embarrassing! I was starting to wonder if the eldest of Giovanni's 3 daughters belonged to his 1st wife. Between her age and her similar name (Annaelena), it seemed possible. But her 1899 birth record put that idea to rest.

The timeline helped me spot the problem and work to investigate and correct it.

I couldn't find Elena Russo's birth record despite checking a bunch of possible years. So now I'm trying to extend the timeline back another generation. Giovanni and Maria's birth records tell me their parents' names and approximate ages. I can go after their records.

I may never write down a formal research plan or keep a research log. But from now on, when I'm studying one family in particular, a timeline is a total must.