Importance of Organized Research

Photo by Ayla Verschueren on Unsplash

​Today I learned a valuable lesson about researching onsite. I decided to visit the local FamilySearch Center which has a lovely bank of computers to access those “locked” files online. Oh, if only they would unlock them for home use…but that is another story. Let’s look at lessons learned.

The day before my visit I printed out my detailed trees of ancestors I wanted to find their births, marriages, and death records. I had leveraged the Familienbuch so had much of this information, but you know it is great to go back to the source to discover the actual records. I was feeling pretty good about my preparedness until I started looking at the records.
 
Here are some things that I learned:

1. While it sounds great to search for everyone that might be in a particular set of records, it doesn’t really work well. Some records skipped the very years I needed or didn’t have the records for those years in a particular village.
2. Stick to one family group at the maximum. I thought I was being efficient doing a couple of family lines since they are from the same area. Unfortunately, this was not as effective as I thought it might be. I found myself jumping from person to person in the trees and shuffling through the villages and years.
3. Create a word document with a list of the records, summary of the record, what family related to this information and the film number to help me navigate to the records I was trying to look at from home.
4. Be prepared for hiccups. Added to this, the server or system kept requesting logins and locking up records that would normally be available at the center. It might have been the genealogy gremlins at work. Anyway, I decided to cut my losses and return another day.

  
What I would do differently:

1. I would still bring my computer and the family trees, but I would only focus on one branch for one session.
2. I think it might have been more effective to create a chart with the dates, type of record, village, and person’s name prior to my research excursion. This would have served two purposes: 1. Easy way to organize my research and make the best use of my time. 2. It would become an automatic research record where I could log where I looked and if I found the information.
3. Remember to note what I did and didn’t find so I won’t look again for records that I’ve searched for previously. Sometimes when time is limited it is easy to skip this step and only focus on the “found” records.

 I hope my lessons learned help you on your next on-site expedition. While I appreciate being able to look for records from the comfort of my laptop at home, we still need to go to locations and research. Happy researching!