January 17

Today I worked some more on the descendants of my great-great grandfather, John Thielke and Wilhelmina Buss.  I am researching their third child. It seemed like I found a lot more names and facts but when I sync my FTM file with my Ancestry’s file, the results were a little disappointing. I added 7 new people and made changes to 11 existing people and deleted 2 people. Actually I didn’t delete them, but merged then into one child. John and Wilhelmina had 10 children of which 7 were alive by the 1900 census. However, I have noticed that their children seem to use different names throughout their life. Their third child is a good example. I have her listed as Helen, Ellen, Helohne, Henry (on a census), and Lena (on another census). So today I selected Helen as the primary name and merged my “Henry” and “Lena” records into Helen. I am really confident that Henry was supposed to be Helen and the census had the sex wrong too.  This isn’t the first time I have seen the sex wrong for a person who I knew what their sex was.

I did manage to add 65 citations and made 1 citation change.  So this does show that I did input a lot of data. I’m done with Helen Thielke’s descendants and have printed some more records for input tomorrow.

January 17 – Make a list of vital records you need. Check each state vital-records office’s Web site for record locations and fees. Print out the required forms.

This is a pretty good suggestion, however, keep in mind that sometimes vital records are transcribed and found online. You may even find the actual image of some of these records on-line. Make sure you look everywhere before paying for state vital-records. My ancestor’s hail mainly from Wisconsin and they passed a law several years ago that makes all vital records $20.00 each. So now I only obtain records for my direct ancestors. Plus I now try to obtain only marriage certificates because it has two generations for two families, the bride and her parents and the groom and his parents. This is six names that I may get on one vital record.  Plus, the marriage date and sometimes the birth dates of the bride and groom, and even thou rarer, the parents place of birth.

Good luck in obtaining your families vital records, these primary sources are the backbone of your research.