Family Tree

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Permalink Reply by GeneJ on October 2, 2009 at 8:46am

Hi Arline:

From your profile, appears you are hoping to locate information about your grandmother's mother, Barbara Ann Tate-Johnson; you have an address where she once lived.

Have you developed your own pedigree chart, and are you creating family group sheets for each of the families reported on your pedigree chart? If not and you need some forms to work with, Google "pedigree chart" and "family group sheet"-- some of the Internet sites returned will have downloadable forms.

Start a research log (click HERE), into which you record information about the sources of information used to create your pedigree chart and your family group sheets. You can record notes from those sources in the same research log. Some of the information you will have found in documents, while other information will have come from interviews or correspondence with relatives--all are sources.

Most of us find that these tools (research log, pedigree chart and family group sheet), help us keep our information organized.

When you develop your charts and forms, be detailed!
(a) Locations are Cities and Towns (and/or townships) that are associated with Counties, and those Counties are associated with States. There are times when you have only part of the location information, so you record what you know and any other clues you might have found.
(b) Births, Marriages and Deaths are associated not only with locations but with dates (DD MMM YYYY). As with locations, sometimes we have only partial dates or estimates for family events .
(c) Sometimes you find records that report different birth (or or death) dates and locations for the same person; not everyone you interview will remember the same events and details the same way! What seem apparent duplications/differences can be written into the notes to your family groups sheets. These differences usually end up being less important than being able to keep track of which version (detail) came from which source.
(d) So many families had more than one child, more than one marriage. When you develop your family group sheet, make sure to record what is known about _all_ of the children born to a family, and make notes about first, second, etc. marriages.

With what you “know” organized and documented, you’re then ready to research to learn more. If your research goal is to find more information about your grandmother’s mother, you’ll probably first use detailed information about your grandmother and her siblings to indentify records about that family. In that process, you will learn more clues about the mother (your grandmother’s mother); each clue is a lead. Census record are easily accessible and searchable—by finding your grandmother and her siblings with a parent or parents in one or more census is usually a great way to begin to develop more information/more clues.

From your research log, family group sheet and a census (or two) in hand, you can include in your query more details and, as attachments, upload your family group sheet and the census you located. Makes for a great query!

Hope this helps. –GJ

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