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Saturday, June 2, 2012

Society Saturday, Organizing Your Research

This Saturday, Shirley Becker presented,"Organizing Your Research".
 It was a great topic to follow up on the Beginners Class I did the month of May for 15 people.

The posts on the topics are put out by Olive and Janice in a Quarterly bulletin.  You can always find the topics also on the Chula Vista Genealogical Society's web page.


In the Beginners Class we started with the 5 Generation Chart and a Group Sheet.  Explaining the 5 Generation Chart starts with oneself.  I like to start a Group sheet with the Parent and self as the child.

Explaining you need a Group Sheet for every sibling on the first Group sheet. As one gathers documentation and papers to file, it was great to have this back up topic so soon.
Since Dad is descended from Carl Fremont. I can show you need a group sheet for each child.
This exception is if the child died young before marriage and no descendants.
Though to keep your record count straight you could do one up.

We need one for Nora, just like what was done for her parents.
Ditto for each child under Nora Jones.
Now your to Carl my Grandfather. After you have created your group sheets you continue to fill in the blanks of the names of the children for each person.
I think it important to have the three generations for later research purposes and some you learn later and may not have to start with. 
So the next group down would be  the children of these descendants.
1. Nora Jones descendant Mr. Roberts talks to me often. Helps fill in the blanks and put meat on the bones of the family story.
2. George Jones family I communicate with often and share information. I have met some of them
3  Alva Jones family I also communicate with, shared photos and data. 
4. Walter Jones family, I have met, talked and shared with.
5. LaMonte JONES family, I have met two of his sons, one in the 1950's and the other one in the 1990's.  We still communicate and it helps to fill in some of the blanks on the various pages you need to find clues for.
6. Carl Fremont is my Grandfather, Dad was  his first  born child. Of course I have the data on him and his children my Uncle and Aunts, cousins and even some friends.

Today Shirley talked of contacting and keeping the knowledge available of collateral kin, it is the link to the bread and butter of the missing. Also for basic research you do not need to do in depth research on all of them but your direct line. But do not loose touch with them for they may hold the key to a missing puzzle piece.

Direct Line is  you, your parent, grandparent, great grandparent, great great grands, etc.
Collateral is lines next to you but not your direct line.

When people pass on there is normally a distribution of their goods. When a genealogist or family historian has a blank space,(brick wall), you look for the families that may have gotten the clue you need to resolve your blank space. Inherited Items may be: Pictures, albums, letters, bible, stories,
quilts, table clothes, tools (clues to their trades), jewelry, furniture, &  recipe books ( love the recipe books for clues). I could write an entire story on the clues of them. 

Genealogy is like a jig saw puzzle it takes all those little pieces to find the total answer, if it can ever totally be found.

Shirley talked of keeping the surnames together and the subfiles within the files. As you can see from this chart above  you have JONES and other surnames but are subfiles of JONES because of being daughters.  

Some people color code, some do other methods but anything your comfortable with is what you should use.

The folders can be used also on your computer and in your genealogy program if you have one.

I hope you can attend one of our workshops and you can learn more of the great tips and hints on
how to keep track of your information, how to and where to store it for safe keeping.
She briefly touched on DropBox for storage and using a back up Cloud or drive for storage.

Thumb drives are good for small amounts and taking from activity to activity but for saving data you 
want to consider either cloud storage(off your computer) or a back up Drive with data put on it at least every couple days or daily.

Hope to see you at the next workshop.  

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