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This series of posts are based on the Genealogy Do-Over Workbook by Thomas MacEntee. I highly recommend it. 🙂 I just want to say there are parts of this workbook that I am not posting about, so if you would like the full set of tasks, then visit Thomas’ page or purchase the workbook.

Oh No! What did you do?

I can only blame today’s events on the craze of holiday preparations. There has been so much going on that I haven’t been thinking straight. This doesn’t mean that I regret what I just did, because you’re going to be excited for me too. In the interest of full disclosure though, I just did something that probably should have waited longer in my Do-Over.

Just Tell Us!

What you see above is a screen shot of my unfinished shopping basket at the UK General Register Office website. That’s right, I ordered records! You didn’t hear me wrong, I got more than two!

You might be asking yourself why this could be considered a bad thing. First things first, I did this after 9pm at night. That means I’m doing it when my mind isn’t at its best. I’m pretty tired and I’m probably not thinking my best right now. Secondly, I probably should have waited until I reached this point in my Do-Over to spend any more money on records. I mean, what if I’m wrong and these aren’t my people?

To be fair to myself, I have been steadily working my way up the family tree and ordering records along my main line of descent. There’s no way to work up the family tree but to order records, go to the repositories to get the records, find the records online, or hire someone to find them for me. I’ve chosen the first option for now!

Well, since you did it, you might as well show us the rest!

The website has changed since May, when I last used it. You are now able to search the indexes. Well, that might have been there before and I didn’t notice. I usually just get the GRO Reference details from Ancestry or FindMyPast’s Indexes. This time, all I had to do was put in the information I knew off the top of my head and hit search! I got 1 result! The best part is that in this search, it is showing me that his mother’s maiden name is Beattie. The other indexes don’t tell me that!

Note from blog writer: I know that if I was doing a reasonably exhaustive search, I’d be doing more than an exact search. It was 9pm and not 9am though and I wanted to buy four records, not seventy. haha! Don’t worry, I won’t sully my new, beautiful, organized, sourced, exhaustively looked over file. 

That doesn’t mean that it is your guy though.

This is my family file before the Do-Over. I know, I’m not supposed to be looking at it but I am and we’re moving on from that. 😉 You might ask why I put the Richard part in the search since it’s a middle name. Well, in 98% of the records for William Richard Parkin, the Richard is shown. Even after his death, in city directories, Ann lists herself as “Richard Parkin’s widow”. You can also see in my old file that there was a big question mark for the maiden name of his mother. I have her birthplace from the England censuses but I had no clue about her maiden name.

I’m also ordering the birth record for Ann Maltis/Malthouse/Malthuse/Mattis/Whateveritis. What is wonderful for me is that in the marriage record I found for a William Malthouse, my guess on the name of his wife was Amelia Lilburn. It looks like the GRO office index agrees with me on that spelling but not the surname spelling of the father. Oh well, you can’t win them all!

Okay, but I’m still not getting why you are beating yourself up about the old file.

The short of it is, I would have loved to have been “good” and stay away from my old file completely. These lines have been dormant for a long time for me. To have any movement is so refreshing. I’m not “actively” researching this old file. I’m still chugging along on my Do-Over at a slow, wonderfully organized rate. Being able to order these records ahead of time is going to save me time later. If you’ve ordered records from another country, then you know why! It takes awhile to get them here, but it’s oh so worth it!

Besides, my file wasn’t that messed up along the main line, it’s the siblings where things started getting murky. Mainly because I have actually ordered records for the main line. Imagine that, it’s more accurate when you actually seek out the proper documents! Ha!

Note from the blog writer: I use the term actively loosely since technically ordering records is an activity and it has to do with my old tree. We’re moving on though, remember!! Besides, there’s no way to rule out records without actually looking at them. See, I’m thinking rationally even though it’s currently 10:37 pm.

Previous Posts in this Series:

• Genealogy Do-Over Index

This series of posts are based on the Genealogy Do-Over Workbook by Thomas MacEntee. I highly recommend it. 🙂 I just want to say there are parts of this workbook that I am not posting about, so if you would like the full set of tasks, then visit Thomas’ page or purchase the workbook.

Before I get back in the swing of things, I thought it would be nice to see a general overview of where my files stand now. I’d also like to show one of the main reasons that I decided to do this Do-Over. It might surprise you, but it wasn’t because I was shaky about my family tree! I’m actually pretty confident about it. Though, I’m enjoying the process of questioning every piece of information I find.

Before my Do-Over

The one thing that was frustrating me the most in my genealogy research was that I could never find anything. It was all organized but I felt like I was constantly clicking around for things. The above screenshot was just my birth records. I could use my identification numbers and find things or I could look for the right number but it wasn’t very efficient. I felt like if I was trying to find something, I could never find it. It wasn’t until I was starting my Do-Over and I realized that when I was looking for people, I was thinking of them by their names. The numbers were just distracting me! Once I made the decision to throw out the numbering system, things seemed to start moving along a lot better for me!

After my Do-Over Started

From the screenshot above, you can see this is just one person! Everything for my Grandpa Moore is in the same place. If there is someone else involved in that record or in the picture, they’ve got a copy of the file in their own folder. I’ve named every file so that if I know the year, it’s right in the file name. It’s also easy to see at a glance where my blanks are in terms of the years. Just looking above, I can see I don’t have digital files for the years between 1935 and 1940. I also jump from 1958 to 1967! This gives me the motivation to say, “What was happening in these years?”

What else is different?

Another thing I am doing different this time is smaller than everything else. I’m actually adding pictures! It isn’t that big of a deal, but I find that it makes me smile when I’m jumping around the tree and I’m seeing my cousins, my siblings, and their children’s faces staring back at me. It makes me remember the reason I’m doing all of this.

You last saw my Binder Index Excel file in August in the post, Genealogy Do-Over: In the Thick of It. The only change I’ve made is the new tab for “Digital Records”. It seemed silly to me to be so detailed for my paper files and treat the digital files like they were just as important. The only change I made was in the first column, where I named it ‘Downloaded’ instead of ‘Scanned’. The one thing I am also doing but isn’t being shown is I’m slowly adding everything into Evidentia. I don’t know why, but for some reason I didn’t add some of my digital records into the program. Now that I am going to be generating proof reports for everyone, I really need to add those records in. It sure is a good thing I’ve actually been keeping track of my records or I would already be sunk in my Do-Over!

Thanks for hanging in there for this recap, hopefully we’ll start getting back into the fun part soon! 🙂

Previous Posts in this Series:

• Genealogy Do-Over Index