Tag: citations

52W Mark III – Week 41: Most

Five or six years ago I presented on the topic of “Law and Genealogy” at a continuing professional development conference. In my PowerPoint presentation, I used several examples from my own research to illustrate several of my points. For example, to illustrate one of five parts of the Genealogical Proof Standard, I used an image of the citations I used in support of the date of the birth of my great grandfather, Johannis Albertus van der Fluit (1894-1932).

What struck me at the time was how many sources I had for that one fact – 17 at the time. If memory serves, I think that was one of the reasons I chose this fact to demonstrate the point. Heck, I could have used this image to illustrate the principle of conducting reasonably exhaustive research!

That slide has stuck with me, so with “Most” being the prompt for this week’s 52 Ancestors Challenge, I got to wondering which ancestor in my family tree has the most sources. Not necessarily the best, or most reliable, or bear the most evidentiary weight – just most. Unfortunately, my software won’t provide the kind of statistics I’m looking for, so I manually went through the entries for all my direct ancestors up to and including my great grandparents.

The most heavily sourced of any fact for this set of ancestors is the April 13, 1919 marriage of my mother’s maternal grandparents, Milton Leo Burgess and Hazel Nelson, with 22 unique sources cited.

Not far behind is the list of sources demonstrating the marriage of my father’s maternal grandparents, Adrianus Komen and Elizabeth Bakker. I have cited 19 separate sources for their marriage that occurred on April 7, 1921.

Returning to Hazel Nelson, I also have 20 separate individual sources for her birth, which occurred on December 15, 1899.

However, where I can find the most sources is in the two folders of electronic documents I’ve gathered that are all vying for my attention. There is also a banker’s box of documents that also need to be written up. Unfortunately, I hate preparing source citations as much as I love genealogy!

These sources aren’t going to write themselves up…Where are the genealogy elves when you need them?

52 Weeks – Week 48: Overlooked

This week, the 52 Ancestors Challenge asks us to consider “Overlooked”. What might I have overlooked? If I knew the answer to that, it wouldn’t be overlooked!

Thinking it over, it’s not so much what I’ve overlooked as what I’ve ignored.

  • All children of my ancestors other than the child from whom I’m descended

This is actually a thing of the past, but it’s a case of doing the work now that I should have done a very long time ago.

Back in the day – decades ago, now – I would sometimes ignore the multitude of children some of my ancestors brought into this world. Sometimes it was when a couple had ten or more children. More often than not, it was something I did when an ancestor remarried, or had an earlier marriage, which produced children. One of my great great grandfathers had 19 children – nine with his first wife and ten with his second.

There were simply so many kids in some families – even in ones with parents who only ever had one marriage – that I didn’t feel like I had to the time to enter all of them into my database or that it was all that important. In the case of previous or subsequent marriages, I’d usually annotate the entry with a note saying how many children the couple had together. Sometimes I’d include the first names of those children, but without their vital stats. What a time saver!

Not the longest list of children in my database!

Of course, anyone who has done genealogy for a while will have immediately spotted the error of my ways. I was foolishly ignoring my FAN club! Also known as “cluster genealogy”, “FAN” stands for “Friends, Associates, and Neighbours”, although over the years many have included “Family” amongst the friends. It is a term coined by Elizabeth Shown Mills, which involves researching the cluster of people around the person who is the target of the study. It often involves research of a person who might seem otherwise elusive. Evidence about their FANs might shed light on the otherwise mysterious relative.

I now make a point of including all the children of my direct ancestors. As well, I have a couple of direct ancestors for whom I am researching all their descendants. Of course, this has meant going back and properly adding all those children to my tree.

  • Citations

You have to take the crunchy with the smooth. As much as I love genealogy, like all things, it has its down sides. For me, it’s writing up source citations.

It is such a tedious time-consuming chore that I’ll sometimes put down my genealogy for weeks or even months at a time. All the while, mounds of data, digital and paper, keep piling up because sometimes I can’t not research. On top of that, I often have a gazillion browser tabs open at a time, waiting for the day that I bite the bullet and start doing the work.

It’s the doing dishes of genealogy, yet absolutely vital to the process.

  • Something I haven’t ignored?

This blog!