This post is a continuation of my Genealogy Go-Over Journey overview post.  The “Table of Contents“ is provided at the bottom of this post as well.

This post will discuss both Genealogy Goals for record retrieval and documentation, as well as tidiness and agility of genealogy software.

When I started this process, I wanted to “clean up”. my tree because it had become unruly. While that is a noble cause, a tidy tree really isn’t the ultimate goal of my genealogy work.My ultimate goal is to be able to adequately document my heritage.  That goal will be one of a lifetime, and will continue to be important beyond the immediate desire to “tidy up”.  But without tidying up first, the focus will always be sorting and sifting through information that might not be relevant.  Thus I embarked on what now looks to be a YEARS long process of getting my research in some order that can assist not only me in better documentation and story writing, but will be easier for those who come after me to appreciate.  Thus, while a lot of the focus in this series about my “Go-Over” will seem process oriented and technical, this will lead to bigger and better things as I’m then able to focus on the real “research”.  I have found that I do get distracted from the “tidying” frequently when I run across a new record or uncover a formerly discovered record that is now more relevant to my research.  Maybe that’s why it’s taken over 18 months to just “clean up” 75% of my tree.  So both the Genealogy Goals and the Process Goals are important today, and for the future.

First up, Genealogy Goals.

Genealogy Goals

I’m sure that it does not need saying that the most important goal most of us have is being accurate in our genealogy research. So there; I’ve said it anyway!  But what does accuracy mean, and how much work needs to be put into each entry in your tree?  Here’s what I’ve decided for myself, as my tree has expanded far beyond my known relatives and our common ancestors.  As I’ve started including more and more DNA Matches, I have a tree that is far-flung, and has the propensity to swell by 10-20 people with every DNA Match I find.  Thus I needed to come up with good goals for my research.  They differ somewhat based on just where the person I’m researching actually is in my tree.

Direct Ancestors and Closely Related Family

For my direct ancestors, and my closely related family I keep hearing Freddie Mercury singing  “I want it all and I want it now”!  And yet, there are definitely sources and information that I’m not that interested in, and don’t see the purpose of keeping for my own tree.  Your mileage may vary, as they say!  For closely related family, I think mostly of relative groups with whom I have personal relationships and knowledge, and at least the children of all of my direct ancestors.  For example, I knew 4 of my great-grandparents, and many of my great-aunts/uncles, second cousins, 1st cousins 1x removed, etc.  All of those family members are important to my research, because they are important to me and my memories.  All of the grandchildren of my 3rd Great-Grandparents might not be something I feel the need to take the time to document exhaustively.  Their descendants can take on those tasks.  But anyone I personally knew or even personally “knew of” through family conversations holds great interest to me.  And of course, sometimes you run across someone that you just want to know more about.

For example, my 4th Great-Grandfather moved from North Carolina to Tennessee in the 1820s, accompanied by two of his brothers.  Those brothers were 2/3 of a set of triplets named Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.  Indeed, Abednego apparently left Moore County after killing a man in an altercation.  It seems that back in the 1820s you could escape hanging if you left town quietly! Or so the story goes. How can one NOT want to know everything about these folks!

Additionally, finding as many good source records to verify my ancestral line will help if I want to apply for Daughters of the American Revolution membership, or the Tennessee Ancestry Certificate Program.  I will “stumble” on some of these records during my cleanup, but any outstanding record needed will be a task that can be deferred until after my tree is tidy and agile!

So here are the guidelines I use for including sources and facts in my database for direct ancestors and closely related family.

• Original source records for vital facts – I’ll take all I can get!  If I have access to an image of an original record, then I do not keep all of the many “index” records that both FamilySearch and Ancestry might provide.  I’ve found FamilySearch profiles where the same marriage, for example, has been cited in 12-15 different “indexing sources”.  Nothing new to see if I have the actual document “in hand” (more likely on my computer, backed up to three hard drives and to 2 cloud backup sources!).  If I do not have a hard copy physical image available for the record, then I will use index sources/compilation sources as a backup to the original source document, but otherwise I just keep the original source document images:
  • Birth certificate
  • Baptismal record
  • Marriage license
  • Death Certificate
  • Burial Information
• Census records for every census done during a person’s lifetime.  This includes censuses in the US prior to 1850, when no names were given other than the head of household.  I use the 90-60 Census Workbook discussed in My Genealogical Tools in order to sort out similar names, and attempt to place those ancestors in a census whenever possible.
• Military Records
• Interesting Educational Records, or records documenting important achievements and occupations.
• Original source records for legal transactions – if I cannot find images of the actual documented event, I will use an index, transcript or other online genealogical site that I have a sense of trust for.
  • Land purchases
  • Legal disputes
  • Wills and codicils
  • Probate
  • Newspaper notices
• Photos – if I have photos of ancestors, I will keep a sampling of images for my genealogy file.  The rest are simply in my “photo albums”, which by the way, due to our move to Italy, exist in paper format in Colorado, and in digital format on my Mac and “in the cloud” as discussed in the Tools discussion.  I also keep photos of important family heirlooms, such as the baptismal gown that has been in my ex-husband’s family since the late 1800s ,and has the name and date of each child baptized in the gown embroidered on it.
• Copies of important pages from family bibles
• Family history documents, such as genealogies, letters to family members that mention relationships
• Links to family genealogy sites that have important research. In my case, sites like Choates of the South, and The Wallace Family of Moore County and History of the Zanrè Family!
• Find-A-Grave memorial ID, Wikitree profile ID, FamilySearch Profile ID when possible.  While these in and of themselves are not always accurate “sources”, they often provide links to other source materials, thus having these items listed in the database makes for easy retrieval.

Distant Relations and DNA Matches

As I mentioned in the beginning of this “Go-Over” series, my family tree exploded with new growth after I started adding DNA matches to my database. Over time I realized that I had a bit of a mess on my hands, database-wise.  I made some decisions on what I wanted to keep as documentation for these far-flung relations.  Essentially I wanted the simplest paper trail possible from the DNA match, back to our Most Recent Common Ancestor.  This means it is possible that as few as two source citations can work for the desired outcome:  one to show that a person was the child of the stated parents, and one that would show the person was the parent of his/her stated child!  Most of these records contain one or more of the following:

• Birth record showing names of parents
• Death record showing names of parents and/or spouses
• Marriage records showing names of spouses and possibly parents
• Census records showing family relationships, or inferred family relationships
• Wills and/or probate records
• Find-A-Grave records.  Note, that while Find-A-Grave memorials are by no means proof of relationships, they provide a narrative that is important for the information in my tree.  I keep a Find-A-Grave record for every person in my tree that I can find in order to have that information in reports and biographies.

Process Goals

Now that I’ve defined my Genealogical Goals for my Go-Over, let’s talk about the Process Goals.  In my situation, these are based on computerized routines.  Yours might be based on a filing cabinet in your basement!  It is important though to define how you will accomplish your Process Goals

Source Citations

Source citations come in all shapes and sizes, especially if you are using Family Tree Maker or like software that allows for syncing and merging from Ancestry and FamilySearch.  Some source citations, such as census documents, or FindAGrave entries, can easily be standardized.  Others are not so easy to standardize.  Birth records from different locations around the world will be laid out differently.  Marriage records might or might not include parent names.  Death certificates from different times or locations might not always include standardized information.  I decided to focus on records that are easy to standardize.  Those include census records, FindAGrave, records from a particular State, etc.  For those, I try to make the records as uniform as possible.  This allows me to not only tell at a glance if I have all of the information needed, but also avoid duplicates.  I will go over specifics for these in other posts dedicated to census records, FindAGrave and the like.

Person Profiles

As I work on individual people in my tree, I want to know whether I have verified that person. I decided on two different ways to accomplish this.  One was with tasks (Family Tree Maker has tasks that can be assigned to individuals – your software or procedures may require a different means to track this information), and the other with visual cues that the person was “complete”.  So, I created tasks for each person who is either a direct ancestor of mine or a person in the direct link to a DNA Match (see Tasks below).  I then also came up with a set of characters that can be added into the “suffix” field of people, so that I can easily tell at a glance what the status of a particular family member is.  I will have a more detailed post about how these are used, but here are a couple of examples:

• 🌟 – this is a DNA match found on Ancestry, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FTNDA, GedMatch, etc.
• ↑ – this DNA match’s tree verifies all the way to our Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA).
• ⭐️ – this person has a verified link to parents
• 🌳 – this person is in a family tree from a DNA Match
• ❓ – this person seems to fit the family, but I cannot find a verified document to prove it
• 💡 – this person has no verified documentation, but the circumstantial evidence and other genealogical documentation strongly suggest a proper connection (moreso than the ❓above
• ⚠️ – this person seems to not fit, has serious contradictions, or simply seems “wrong” to me
• 📖 – this person has no original records to be found, but is listed in a published work that asserts parentage (usually before 1900)
• ✝️ – I have no records other than FindAGrave to link this person to parents
• 🧬 – this is a DNA match whom I have added into my Genealogical DNA Analysis Tool (see more about this in ✅ My Genealogy Tools.

 

So, for example, 

Redmond Choate 🌳📖  – he is in a DNA match’s tree, and I found him in a published work that lists his parents.

Alexander Maness ❓🌳 – he is in a DNA match’s tree, and I cannot verify his parents.

Sarah Francis Burkett ⭐️🌳 – she is in a DNA match’s tree, and I have verified her parents.

I will detail all of the person symbols I use to track folks in my tree in a later post.

 

Place Names

Place names can be quite controversial.  Do we indicate the place name as it was at the time of the event?  Do we indicate the place name as it exists now?  This will really depend on your goals for your family tree.  Family Tree Maker allows you to standardize all place names and uses mapping software to allow you to see the “migration” patterns of your ancestors and their families.  This deserves a discussion all its own, and will come later.  However, deciding how you wish to deal with place names, and trying to be consistent will allow you to pinpoint whether a “possible” ancestor/relation really can be possible.  I have come up with a hybrid approach, and that will be discussed in a later post.

 

Media Names

How do you sort, save and name your digital documents?  Again, this will depend a bit on what you are using as your family tree building software.  Do you create folders based on surnames, locations, dates?  Family Tree Maker mostly takes that out of your hands, placing all images in a single folder, and using categories in the database to sort, categorize and describe the photos.  If you are using genealogy software, learning to “submit” to the will of your software will make your job easier overall.  There will be an entire post focused on media naming conventions.

 

Procedures that aid in reporting

Every family tree building software will have ways to facilitate creating reports “just the way you want them”.  I use Family Tree Maker, so I will occasionally recommend some changes to Facts, Sources, etc. that might flaunt generally accepted genealogical definitions, but will meet specified goals in reporting.  You will no doubt find some quirks in your own family tree building software that will cause you to customize some things in your own procedures.

 

Tasks/To-Dos

Some software like FTM will allow you to assign tasks, both general and at a person level.  If your software does not have a “tasks” function, you should develop a different way to create tasks.  Creating a Trello Board, using a task manager like OmniFocus, creating lists in Evernote, Zotero, etc. can assist you in remembering little things that “still need to be done” for a particular person, etc.

 

So, what are my goals for a perfect tree?  Here goes:

 

Create visual verification marks for accomplishing tasks

Having these goals and procedures set out BEFORE you begin will avoid duplicative efforts.  But do not be fooled.  You will almost CERTAINLY refine your goals as you move forward, and that will require some “fixing” of things you thought were already settled.  No matter how many tips and tricks I give you, you will find your “own way” to do things, and might need to update as you move forward.  Thus, from the very beginning, come up with a way to tell that you have completed a task, and then if you decide to modify your procedures later, find a way to show that you have modified records to your new format.

 

For example, I decided that I would make a notation in every source citation that has been verified and/or standardized.  I decided to use this symbol ✅.  As I move through my source citations, when I have reviewed, verified and standardized the citation, I put ✅ as the very first character (some people dislike that this sometimes messes up the formatting when looking at the source citation in the FTM Sources panel.  You can avoid this by making a sapce the first character, and then the emoji after the space).  Thus, looking at citations in Family Tree Maker for the 1850 census, I see this:

I can tell in a glance that all of these source citations have been

1. reviewed 
2. formatted in a standardized way
3. attached to all relevant people in my tree who are referenced in the source

 

In the off chance that you change your mind and refine your procedures (who am I kidding – I made a number of changes to just the census sources over the first 5 of my 8 grandparents’ lines), you can change the control character.  Change the ✅ to ✅✅ or the like.  Because Family Tree Maker allows me to do a search/replace, when I’m finished with this cleanup (maybe when I’m 90), I can do a quick search for ✅ and remove all of these characters.  Nah – I’ll just keep them in there.  These characters are just for me!

I will outline all of the characters I use for documenting my progress through this Go-Over in a later post.

 

Wow!  This is going to be a lot of work <whisper>I started this in early 2020 – it’s been a lot of work, and still three branches to go as of this writing!</whisper>.  Time to get started really documenting the process!

Here’s the Table of Contents so far!

• ✅ A Genealogy Do-Over/Go-Over Tale
• ✅ My Genealogy Tools
• ✅ Genealogy Goals for the Go-Over and Beyond
• ✅ Defining Important Tasks for the Go-Over
• ✅ Family Tree Maker Backup and Database Maintenance Procedures
• ✅ Exporting the first branch for my Go-Over
• ✅ Defining and Cleaning Place Names in Family Tree Maker
• ✅ Defining and Cleaning Media – General
• ✅ Cleaning Sources – General
• Cleaning Sources – Census Records
• Cleaning Sources – Find a Grave
• Cleaning Facts
• Cleaning Place Names in Family Tree Maker
• ✅ Merging your next branch into your new tree – Family Tree Maker 2019
• ✅ How Wikitree changed my FTM processes

 

Happy tree climbing!