Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- What Genealogy Resources Are You Currently Using?

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

It's Saturday Night again -

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing, and execute it with precision. He asked us to:

1)  What genealogy resources are you currently using? Books, periodicals, manuscripts, ephemera, websites, software, or ???

Thanks to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic.

Here's mine:

I thought I would tackle this question as I would a new genealogy project. I start first with Microsoft Word where I open a new document and create research goals or a single question I want to answer.

Next, I check both my RootsMagic database and my computer file system to see what information I already know about the research subject. I make a list or timeline of that person’s activities that are relevant to the research question. I then make a list of possible record types that might help me answer the research goal.

If I don’t know what resources might be available, I check both Ancestry and FamilySearch to see what they have. At Ancestry, I use the card catalog and focus my search by location. At FamilySearch, I check the Records, Wiki, and Catalog to see what they might have.

Other resources I like to use include Find a Grave for burial records, Newspapers.com, GenealogyBank, and Chronicling America for newspapers, and Fold3 for military records.

As I research, I record the information in my Word document. I might add a snippet of the document, and of course include a full source citation. I also include my analysis and why I think the document concerns the ancestor. Once I have multiple documents, I will correlate the information against each other using tables or even make a spreadsheet in Excel.

Of course, if I think the information is correct, I’ll add it to my RootsMagic database with full citations that I create by scratch. I don’t use the source citation templates that come with the program and use instead their “free form” citation template.

So, in summary, I use a genealogy program (RootsMagic), a word processing program (Word), a spreadsheet program (Excel), and online websites (Ancestry, FamilySearch, Fold3, Newspapers.com, GenealogyBank, Chronicling America, and Find a Grave, plus other sites such as Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Google Books). Specific problems might point me to use other sites or even write emails or visit onsite locations such as county recorder offices, archives, and libraries.

What do you use?

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