[I’m participating in the 14 Day Mini Research Like a Pro Challenge. Thanks to Diana and Nicole at Family Locket for sharing their expertise and guiding us through the experience.] Let’s review. Day 1: Research Question Day 2: Objective I took a look at my tree on FamilySearch and decided to see if I could find a death date and place for Nicholas Connolly, my great-great grandfather. In the forty years that I’ve been “doing genealogy,” it never occurred to me…
[I’m participating in the 14 Day Mini Research Like a Pro Challenge. Thanks to Diana and Nicole at Family Locket for sharing their expertise and guiding us through the experience.] My research question for the 14 Day Challenge focuses on finding a death in Halifax, Yorkshire, England. I’ve never been there and, quite frankly, I couldn’t have picked the county out on an unmarked map a week ago. I could joke that it’s pretty tough to do locality-based research when you…
[I’m participating in the 14 Day Mini Research Like a Pro Challenge. Thanks to Diana and Nicole at Family Locket for sharing their expertise and guiding us through the experience.] Today’s challenge is to carefully examine the two English census records that provide the information that serves as evidence for my great-great grandfather’s death. Building a strong foundation for new research is very important, right? In the works-for-me research process that I’ve developed over the last few years, this is the…
[I’m participating in the 14 Day Mini Research Like a Pro Challenge. Thanks to Diana and Nicole at Family Locket for sharing their expertise and guiding us through the experience.] I love timelines. Years ago, I worked on a complex project to piece together the lives of Myrta Z. Belknap and her daughter Lucy Theodate Holmes (you’ll recognize the names if you’ve read The Devil in the White City) and I created an Access database to sort and organize the many events…
[I’m participating in the 14 Day Mini Research Like a Pro Challenge. Thanks to Diana and Nicole at Family Locket for sharing their expertise and guiding us through the experience.] I’m on a train, snuggled into an economy sleeper, heading west from Chicago, and that gives me a lot of time to think about the ancestor I chose for this challenge — my great-great grandfather, Nicholas Connelly. Truth be told, I really need to do a bit of research to solidly…
[I’m participating in the 14 Day Mini Research Like a Pro Challenge. Thanks to Diana and Nicole at Family Locket for sharing their expertise and guiding us through the experience.] In mid-2018, I finished the eighteen-month version of the ProGen study group experience and if there’s one thing I learned, it’s the power of researching right. My ProGen colleague, Diana Elder, has collaborated with her daughter, Nicole Dyer, to write Research Like a Pro, a book that makes the genealogical research process…
It took me a long time to wrap my mind around the idea of calculating birth date ranges from an age on a particular day but now that I understand how it works, I find it much more useful than just subtracting an age from a year and it isn’t that much harder to do. Let’s use Frank M. Smith as an example. On 2 July 1885, he stated, under oath, that he was forty-eight years old. [1] Subtracting 48…
I’ve been working on my husband’s Smith ancestors and recently I took a close look at the evidence I’ve found for James Ayer Smith’s birth date and place. Here’s a quick summary of where I’m at: A compiled genealogy suggests James Ayer Smith was born 12 January 1808 in Waterville, New York. [1] An obituary suggests he was born 24 June 1807 in Paris, Oneida County, New York. [2] This is a case of unknown informants providing indeterminable information–direct conflicting…
This morning’s goal was to locate a death notice or obituary for Margaret B. Richardson who died 9 April 1896 in Baltimore. First, I searched The Sun using my GenealogyBank subscription. I found two matches for death notices which was satisfying. But, the digital image was a black and white copy and there were two key things I couldn’t read–Margaret’s age and the street number for her daughter’s address. Next, I decided to see what I could find using my Newspapers…