Читать книгу Genealogy For Dummies - Helm April Leigh - Страница 12

IN THIS CHAPTER

Determining who to research first

Researching through interviews

Understanding the value of photos

It’s likely that one of the reasons you are reading this book is to learn how to record the history of your ancestors. In Chapter 1, we gave you some practical experience in documenting your life. This chapter presents skills for documenting the lives of your ancestors.

A Brief Message about Research Steps

We know you are eager to find the juicy details of your ancestors’ lives and we don’t want to slow you down. However, it is important to understand a little about how to research before jumping in head first. To help, we introduce a few ideas here, and then, in your spare time, you can read Chapter 13 for more information on the research cycle.

To ensure you are getting the most out of your research and you don’t have to backtrack and research things again, it is a good idea to follow a research plan. We’ve come up with the Helm Online Family Tree Research Cycle to help you along the path. The Cycle contains six basic steps – planning, collecting, researching, consolidating, validating, and distilling. We cover each of these areas over the course of the book. In this chapter, we focus on the areas of planning and collecting.

Selecting a Person to Begin Your Search

Before you can get very far in your research, you need to take the first crucial step in planning – selecting a person to research. Selecting a person sounds easy, doesn’t it? Just choose your great-great-grandfather’s name, and you’re off to the races. But what if your great-great-grandfather’s name was John Smith? You may encounter millions of sites with information on John Smith – unless you know some facts about the John Smith you’re looking for, we can guarantee you’ll have a frustrating time online.

Trying a semi-unique name

The first time you research online, start with a person whose name is, for lack of a better term, semi-unique. By this we mean a person with a name that doesn’t take up ten pages in your local phone book but is still common enough that you can find some information on it the first time you conduct a search. If you’re really brave, you can begin with someone with a common surname such as Smith or Jones, but you’ll have to do a lot more groundwork upfront before you can determine whether any of your findings relate to your ancestor.

Also, consider variations in spelling that your ancestor’s name may have. Often, you can find more information on the mainstream spelling of his or her surname than on one of its rarer variants. For example, if you research someone with the surname Helme, you may have better luck finding information under the spellings Helm or Helms. If your family members immigrated to the United States in the last two centuries, they may have Americanized their surname. Families often Americanized their names so they would be more easily pronounced in English; sometimes the surname was simply misspelled and subsequently adopted by the family.

For more information on name variations, check out the Name Variations in the United States Indexes and Records page at FamilySearch:

https://familysearch.org/wiki/en/Name_Variations_in_United_States_Indexes_and_Records

Narrowing your starting point

If you aren’t sure how popular a name is, try visiting a site with surname distribution maps. The Forebears website has a database for the meaning and distribution of 11 million surnames. Here’s what to do:

1. Open your browser and go to Forebears search site (http://forebears.co.uk/surnames).

The site appears with a search form at the top.

2. Type the surname you’re researching in the Enter a Surname field.

As you type, the site will suggest surnames. You can click on the drop-down list after you find a match for the surname you are using.

3. Click Search.

The color surname distribution map appears as in Figure 2-1. The surname is more frequent in areas colored in deep blue. The tables at the bottom of the page provide more details on the surname.

4. To get a closer look at a particular area, click the country on the map. The regional level appears (for selected countries).

Figure 2-2 shows the frequency of the Helm surname in the United States in 2014. For some countries, you can change the date on the map through the date drop-down box located just above the map.

FIGURE 2-1: A distribution map for the surname Helm.

FIGURE 2-2: The regional view of the Helm surname.

A good reason to check out distribution maps is that you can use them to identify potential geographic areas where you can look for your family during the years covered by the site. If we hit a wall and can’t find additional information online about a specific individual or the surname, we know we can start looking at records in these areas to find more clues about families with the name. We hope that by doing so, we’ll find our branch. For a list of surname distribution sites by country see the Surname Distribution Maps article at https://familysearch.org/wiki/en/Surname_Distribution_Maps.

Choosing someone you know about

In addition to choosing a person you’re likely to have success researching, you want to use a person you already know something about. The more details that you know about a person, the more successful your initial search is likely to be.

For example, Matthew used his great-grandfather William Abell because he knew more about that side of his family. His grandmother once mentioned that her father was born in LaRue County, Kentucky, in 1876. This gives him a point of reference for judging whether a site has any relevant information on his family. A site is relevant if it contains any information on Abells who were located in or near LaRue County, Kentucky, before or around the year 1876. Try to use the same technique with your ancestor. For more information on how to extract genealogical information from your family to use in your research, see the section, “Getting the 4-1-1 from Your Kinfolk,” later in this chapter.

Selecting a grandparent’s name

Having trouble selecting a name? Why not try one of your grandparent’s names? Using a grandparent’s name can have several benefits. If you find some information on an individual but you aren’t sure whether it’s relevant to your family, you can check with relatives to see whether they know any additional information that can help you. This may also spur interest in genealogy in other family members who can then assist you with some of your research burden or produce some family documents that you never knew existed.

With a name in hand, you’re ready to see how much information is currently available about that individual. Because this is just one step in a long journey to discover your family history, you want to begin slowly. Don’t try to examine every resource right from the start. You’re more likely to become overloaded with information if you try to find too many resources too quickly. Your best approach is to begin searching a few sites until you get the hang of how to find information about your ancestors online. And keep in mind that you can always bookmark sites in your web browser, or record the URL in a spreadsheet or your genealogical application, so that you can easily return to them later, when you’re ready for more in-depth research.

For the purposes of this chapter, we’ll research Matthew’s great-grandfather, William Henry Abell – although, feel free to use the following steps on a person that is your research interest.

Beginning to Put the Puzzle Together

We’ve talked a bit about planning your research in the previous sections. We hope that you have selected a person or group of people to research. Before turning to the computer, we suggest that you move to the second research phase and collect some information that will help you evaluate the information that you find online, in a library, or in an archive. As you will see, there may be a lot of resources that you haven’t thought of that can propel your research.