Week 16: Step (52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks)

The theme for Week 16 is "Step." When I wrote this theme, I thought about all of the "step" relationships in our family trees and how they are often overlooked. But there are numerous ways to interpret "step" -- steps in a house, long walks, steps in a process, etc. Feel free to be creative! Click here to see all of the 2024 prompts. 

When I think of Step, I do think of the steps in a process. Especially my steps during my research. Over the many years that I have been doing genealogy, my steps have changed. I could not afford or even justify the expense of having an Ancestry subscription because I didn’t do genealogy on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis to justify the expense. Thus, my research was done in spurts, I might set a weekend aside, usually when Ancestry was offering a free weekend and I would gather, collect and save all the documents I could find. Then I would sort through those saved documents and analysis if they were for my people. 

The problem, I rarely saved the source citation and thus inputting this information into my tree was lacking a very important part of the entire process, creating a source citation.

Thus, I decided to develop a process on how I would record information in my genealogy software. After, I analysis the data and determine it is for my person, I enter the information along with creating a citation. Then I will save the document to my computer in my genealogy folder, keeping it organized and giving the file a meaningful name. 

At first, this process, seemed daunting and cumbersome. I wasn’t familiar to all these new steps. However, in the long run, it actually saved me time, because I don’t have to guess where I found information. I can quickly find an image of a source document if I want to review it again. The process is so second nature, I do it without much thought.

Plus, my genealogy software package, Family Tree Maker, updated it’s features to allow me to copy the same citation to different facts and even different people. I used to have to retype the citation for every fact I wanted to associated it to. However, FTM now allows me to easily copy and link the citation to any fact I desire. Thus, if I click on a citation, I can easily see what other facts are found on the record.

Do you have process in place when you do your genealogy research? A process can assure that you aren’t missing an important step such as creating a citation. Trust me, unless you have an eidetic memory (which science has never found a single verifiable case), you won’t remember where you searched or where you found that piece of information. 

Remember to have fun and Just Do Genealogy!