Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Tuesday's Tip: Find a Process

Whenever I find a new name for my family database, I immediately begin the chicken-with-its-head-cut-off syndrome.  I gallop from Google to Ancestry to FamilySearch to USGenWeb.  And then back again because I notice something new and have to re-look.  And then again.  And then back again months later because I didn’t document anything during my manic romp through New-Name-Ville.

One day, in my workplace, I realized that I had the same reaction when I was given a particular kind of new project.  Since at work I’m process-oriented, I quickly analyzed why I had this reaction and I realized it’s because we didn’t have a process in place.  I created a process and now it’s all a piece of cake.  Cake without a lot of re-work.

So I made a process for genealogy, too.

I begin by printing a family group sheet (FGS), checklist and notes pages.  I find that I need to do it the old fashioned way- pen and paper; I just can’t do it on the computer.  It’s much easier for me to enter it all later, when I have everything at hand.

I gather the three printed sheets (mine are attached at GoogleDocs here), my Stuck-On-Sources (SOS) from www.svcgg.org, blank sheets of paper, and a pen (not pencil).  I begin by putting the surname at the top of the FGS.  I have binders for each of the main surnames I am researching, so this surname may not be the surname of the person I’m newly working on.

That main surname is the only item that I don’t have an SOS for.  For anything else that I write on the FGS, I have an SOS that I label at the top with the item (i.e. DOB), a number, and then I detail the source.  If more than one item is from this source, I still make an SOS for it, but I just number it the same as the other and skip all the other source crap writing.

Once I document what I just found, I then get to collect new stuff.  Rather than frolic through the internet, flippantly gathering cookies and bookmarks, I use the checklist and keep tabs, SOS-ing and jotting down as I go. 

When I’m bored of my new ancestor, I enter the data into my database and make a list of what else I can check on later on down the road.

I like to keep the original SOS and FGS all penned up and messy, though, as about 10 out of 5 times, I do forget to notice something really important when I enter it into the database…

5 comments:

  1. Debbie,

    Great post. Thanks for sharing your genealogy process, checklists via Google.docs, and the Stuck-on-Sources. Impressive. You are an inspiration.

    Terri

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  2. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I have been trying to come up with something like this for myself, but it always kept getting pushed to the back burner for more pressing things (like Google Reader). I feel like someone just gave me a "Get Out of Jail Free" card! (By the way, those post-its are AWESOME! I'm ordering some today!)

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  3. If anyone would like the Excel file so that you can fix it like you want it, just email me. debbie at mascotmanor dot org. It's really a working living document and is better in Excel than Google docs IMO.

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  4. Love your checklist! Thanks for posting it. I prefer to take notes on my computer -- that's what a second monitor is for.

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  5. Great post! Thank you so much for sharing those forms. I have been needing a research checklist and yours is perfect! Looks like you thought of everything!

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