Steps to Researching My Family History - Step 1 - Building the Base

{Previous Post: Steps to Researching My Family History - Introduction}

In an attempt to make it easier to walk through this process, I will try to include a Table of Contents of sorts by adding links to other posts in the series at the end of each post. I also plan on adding a link the the previous post at the beginning of each post (as seen above).

In our previous episode, I briefly discussed getting started and a couple of the more popular options to use to capture and research famiy history. I also started a new tree in Ancestry that I will be building throughout this series as an example of the process I go through in my online research. I will reiterate that it is important to me to find documentation in my research so that I don't end up chasing incorrect lineage. This also helps to gather correct information that will lead to more and better hints. My goal in this post is to go over accessing and verifying hints, saving documents, and growing your tree through hints.

When I created my new tree in my previous post, I added myself and my parents to the tree along with each of our birthdates. Since they are both still living, I will not be divulging any of their personal information. With that information in place, some hints have shown up in my tree (which look like this).

When you click on the leaf, it will open a list of all of the hints they have compiled associated with that person. For me, it pulled up a birth index (listing of births within a specific period of time in a specified place alphabetized by name, last name first. This will also include the name of each parent and the date of the birth), three different marriage indexes (similar to the birth index, but containing each spouses name and the date of the marriage), three sets of public records (these generally include places you have lived and when you lived there), and an obituary. The first thing I do with this list of hints is look down through the list to see if there is anything I know for sure does not apply to the person I am researching. Since I am not dead, the obituary is obviously not mine, so I click the {Ignore} button for that hint. This will move the hint to a seperate "folder". If you need to go back and retrieve an ignored hint, you can always go to the "Ignored" folder and click the {Don't Ignore} button for that hint. Next, if I am fairly confident that one of the hints is a valid document for this person, I click the {Review} button. This opens a section on the right side of the screen which contains some of the information contained in that document. If there is an image of that document, there will also be a thumbnail of the image in this section. This is where I take a couple of extra steps that a lot of people don't. If there is an image, I click on the thumbnail to open the image where I can read it. Sometumes you will find additional information in the document that you want to capture that is not available in the hint. If you {right click} on the image, you have the ability to save a copy to your own record storage location. I do this for every document that I accept the hint for. This way, if I ever lose access to the account I am using, I will still have access to that document. Not every hint will provide access to an image, however. Once you verify the information in the hint applies to the person you are researching, click the {Yes} button at the bottom of the secion where it asks, "Would you like to save this information to your tree?". The section will then show you a side-by-side comparison of the information in the hint and the informtion you have already saved for that person. If there is any information in the hint ("Record Details" side) that you want to add to your tree ("Your Tree Details" side), click the checkbox next to each bit of information you want to add and click the {Next} button at the bottom. Finally, a similar comparison will come up for each other person contained in the document with the opportunity to create/add to their information in your tree, as well. After you have clicked all of the check boxes for all of the data you want to keep, click the {Save to Tree} button at the bottom. If, after looking at the information closer, you decide this informatin does not apply to the person in your tree (or if you are not sure), click the {Cancel} button instead. Be aware that if there are more than one hint for a specific event (for example, the three different marriage indexes in my list of hints), it is good to check each one individually. After I accepted the first hint (which added my wife to my tree), the second hint contained my wife's middle name (while the first hint only had her middle initial) and the third hint added the city in which we were married (while the first two only showed the county). After verifying the public records (the same way I did the marriage indexes), I moved on to do the same for each of my parents.

When I checked the hints for my father, I found two marriage indexes, five public records, and four school yearbook listings (three of which cantained photos from when he was in high school). NOTE: The first hint you save that includes a photo becomes the default photo for that person. If you load a document that becomes the image that shows up as the photograph of someone in your tree, you can just open the profile for that person click the image, and load an acceptable image to replace it. Or, if you find another hint containing a photo you want to use for their profile photo, there is a checkbox you can select as you save the information that will replace the current image with the one you are saving.

In addition to the hints for other people that my mother was indentified in, there was also one census, one obituary (for her mother), one public record, and four high school yearbook listings. I'll take this opportunity to let you know that in my eyes, there are different degrees of documentation. The most trustworthy are birth, marriage and draft records. These records are generally coming from first hand information. Death records and obituaries are usually second hand information from close family members and are less dependable, but still pretty accurate. Public records and census records are not as reliable. A lot of these are written from unrelated people that are hearing this information for the first time and sometimes information is lost in the translation. Unless I know somethinig about that to expect on the census or public records, I will frequently leave those hints open so I can come back to them later when I have more to work with. I can sometimes obtain information I can use in further research before I actually accept those records into my tree. Since I am already familiar with most of this information in regards to my parents and grandparents, I am comfortable attaching the census and obituary information to her entry (after saving a copy of the census image).

In summary, we talked about accessing and verifying hints, saving documents, and growing your tree through hints in this post. I processed all of the hints for both my father and my mother. This was all information I have heard/seen before. In my next post, I will expand to include my grandparents and their families. Even though I will not be tracking the siblings of my parents, adding this information to our tree will help in future hint revelations. If you have any questions about anything I discussed in this post, please leave me a comment. If you have any suggestions on starting a new tree, feel free to share that information in a comment, as well.

Next post in this series:
Steps to Researching My Family History - Step 2 - Expanding the Foundation

Other posts in the series:

Steps to Researching My Family History - Introduction