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Month: June 2016
Wordless Wednesday: Unknown Man
Wordless Wednesday is a Daily Blogging Prompt from GeneaBloggers.
Genealogy Go-Over: Actually Do-Over
The series of posts I will be writing is based on the Genealogy Do-Over Workbook by Thomas MacEntee. I highly recommend it. 🙂
It doesn’t matter much what I call it. However, I was fired up about something this week and I went on a walk to think about things. I try to do that if I really want to think about something. 20 minutes later, I decided I’m opening up a new, blank Legacy Family Tree file and starting fresh. I could spend a lot of time “fixing” my current working file or I could open a new one and start fresh! I am already going through all this trouble of re-examining my documents and re-writing my sources, so why not just start fresh. I wanted to make this decision before I got into any new researching. I’m hopefully setting myself up for never having to do this kind of thing again! I am certainly much more organized already.
While I am conducting my family interviews, I am re-entering myself, my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncle, and cousins all into my clean file. I had previously went around at a family reunion and got dates from my cousins on one side and my Grandmother had all my cousin information from the other side. I still wanted to do something to make sure I was getting the right information though, so I created a Google Form that I’ll be linking to in my sidebar and on my Facebook page for family members to fill out if they want to.
If you are a family member that would like to check out the form, you can click here.
I have also been entering all my documents into Evidentia as I go. I will probably do a post on Evidentia soon! I am working on entering in all the birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, and obituaries that I have for my grandparents down to my generation. It’s actually surprising me how much information 1) I am lacking from some things and 2) How much information I have for others. It’s a fascinating process. Going over everyone again is going to really help out my research. I can just feel there are holes in it and I’m only working with a small amount of information now. Can you imagine with how long I had been working previously how many holes I had in that file? I guess we will find out!
Other posts in this series:
- Genealogy Do-Over or Go-Over?
- Genealogy Go-Over: Getting Started
- Genealogy Go-Over: Setting Guidelines
- Genealogy Go-Over: Actually Do-Over <- You are here.
- Genealogy Do-Over: Where I’m At
- Genealogy Do-Over: More Decisions
- Genealogy Do-Over: More Prep Work
- Genealogy Do-Over: My Research Toolbox
Source List for this Post:
1. Thomas MacEntee, The Genealogy Do-Over Workbook (Kindle Edition);GeneaBloggers (http://www.geneabloggers.com : downloaded 31 December 2015), Month 3
Find a Grave – Sutcliffe
While I am starting the Genealogy Do-Over/Go-Over, I am not researching anything new. However, I had a couple of post ideas before I started that I thought I’d still share.
I recently got in the marriage record for Paul Sutcliffe and Mary Senior from the State Archives. The New Jersey State Archives is a wonderful source of New Jersey information for me and I am planning a trip there someday, hopefully soon!
What I usually do after I’m done analyzing a new record is I hit census records and I hit Find a Grave. Just to see what kind of opposition I’m going to run into with the new people in my tree. Paul Sutcliffe and Mary Senior have to be two of the easier people in my tree to search for. I haven’t tried super hard yet, but I was able to find possibilities for Mary’s parents pretty quickly. Ancestry suggested a Find a Grave link to me, so that was even better.
Here is the entry on Find a Grave for who I think Mary Senior-Sutcliffe’s father is. Everything looks fine here, it doesn’t have Mary listed as a child but that’s no big deal. Then I saw that there was a huge group of Senior graves in that top picture and I needed to blow it up a bit.
Well folks, that is exciting and disappointing at the same time. Exciting because I might have gone back another generation, and disappointing because the tombstone was cut off. Thats alright though, because I still have potential parents and siblings of Mary Senior to explore. I even have a cemetery location to look at. If they are in a family plot, that will tell me a lot about Paul and Mary. I checked Find a Grave, but the Sutcliffes aren’t listed. I suppose whoever did the Senior graves didn’t know that Mary might be a Senior. Maybe I am barking up the wrong tree completely and that tombstone says Westcliffe.
I will be adding this to my to-do list for when I get there in my re-analyzation of my records!
Adobe Spark
I watched a great tutorial video from Amy Johnson Crow about Adobe Spark. I was inspired to make a video about my grandmother’s ancestors to share with my family. I also attended a Google Hangout with DearMYRTLE’s distant cousin, Sweet Sadie, which was another great walk-through of creating a video. It was a fun, quick process… well besides hearing myself talk. That’s always strange!
There is also the option to create what they call “pages” and “posts”. I didn’t try the pages section yet, but had a little fun with the post section.
Wow, that’s a big, crisp image! I just took a free stock image of Scotland (my dream destination) and used all the different font and shape settings Adobe Spark had pre-built. My blog template will shrink it down to fit a certain size but the original dimensions of the image is 2052 pixels by 2052 pixels. I have to say I love this and will definitely be playing more with it!
