My Trails into the Past

This past Saturday, I attended the Board for the Certification Ed Fund presentation given by Judy G. Russell and Carolyn Ladd. The theme of the day was studying documents, creating citations, and learning the law to understand the documents’ meaning. It was a great day of learning. I thought I would show how I gather the information when locating a document on FamilySearch ’s full-text search. Crafting a citation is not straightforward. I have to go to several screens to gather the information needed. Searching Let’s start with finding a document on Full-text search. I always put the search in quotes in the keyword box. Once I get the returns, I then filter using the place first, down to the county level. If I still have too many hits, I’ll filter by the year, working through the decades. Collecting Citation Information The following image shows the second document from the returns list. From this view, I see the page number, 332. The deed actually begins on page 331, so I will wan...

I wrote about my cool find at the new FamilySearch feature of every word search in US land and probate records. This game-changer has allowed me to locate more records than I had found using just the land indexes and probate indexes. Sometimes the clerk might forget to record the transaction in the index, or if the index was copied into a new modern system, an entry might get missed. Ever wondered how an ancestor got a deed for the land they were selling? It might be missing from the index but is in the deed book. My post yesterday on my other blog , showed how to locate these cool documents. Today, I want to show how to locate the information you need to create source citations. This document is found within the new “images” section, so the procedure I used in the past does not work. The digital film number is not listed above the images as it was before when accessing documents from the catalog entry. Below is the results page for the Coor-Hoggatt agreement. Let’s work our way a...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's  Saturday Night  again - time for some more  Genealogy Fun!! Our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is: 1)  Then and Now - How have you documented your genealogy and family history research with source citations over the years?  What did you start with (Then) and what do you presently use (Now)?  Please share your experiences. Here's mine: When I started doing genealogy in the early 90s after my two children were born, I knew I wanted to have citations for the information I was finding. I used a wire-bound notebook for my research at first. Mostly, I was using either a census record or a book of indexes. I would just write everything that seemed important about the source in my notebook and then keep track of what I found. These were not formal citations in any style. As a science major, I liked the citations we used where we just sorted the author’s name and date of the article within parentheses. ...