Keep It Straight

Keep It Straight.

Welcome to Stuck in the Branches. This is the least glamorous guide in the series and the one that decides whether you are doing a hobby or doing research. It is about writing things down in a way that still makes sense to you in two years, and to somebody else after that.

The Difference Between a Hobby and Research.

A hobby collects names. Research can show where every name came from. The gap between the two is not talent or time, it is whether you wrote down your source at the moment you found it. Everything in this guide exists to close that gap.

You Will Not Remember.

You will tell yourself you will remember where you saw that birth date. You will not. Six months later you will have a date, no idea whether it came from a census, a headstone or a stranger's tree, and no way to tell whether it is true. Then you have to do the work again.

The Individual Record Sheet.

The first of the two forms. One sheet per person: full name, the five facts, parents, spouse or spouses, children, and a notes area for everything that does not fit. The sheet is not the point, the discipline is. One person, one place where their facts live.

The Family Group Sheet.

The second form holds one couple and their children, with the marriage and each child's dates. Individual sheets tell you about people. Group sheets show you the shape of a household, and they are where you notice the gap of seven years that means a child is missing.

One Family Per Sheet, Always.

The temptation is to crowd three generations onto one page because they are all related. Do not. One couple per group sheet, one person per individual sheet. When a sheet gets crowded, start another one. Paper is cheap and confusion is expensive.

Write Surnames in Capitals.

The convention that saves the most trouble: write the surname in capital letters. Giovanni ESPOSITO. In a world of maiden names, married names, double names and names that are both a first name and a surname, the capitals tell you instantly which part of the name is the family.

Always Record a Woman by Her Maiden Name.

A woman goes into your records under the surname she was born with, not her husband's. Record her as Maria RUSSO, married to Giovanni ESPOSITO. Record her as Maria Esposito and you lose her own family, which is half the tree, and you will search for her parents under a name they never had.

Write Dates the Unambiguous Way.

Use day, month spelled out, four digit year. Twelve March eighteen ninety four. Written as numbers, the third of December and the twelfth of March look identical depending on which country wrote them, and that single ambiguity has sent thousands of researchers down the wrong branch.

Write Places Smallest to Largest.

Town, then county, then state or province, then country, every time, even when it feels like overkill. There are dozens of towns with the same name. A place written in full is a place you can find again on a map, in a wiki and in a record index.

A Fact With No Source Is a Rumour.

This is the rule the whole guide is built on. If you cannot say where a fact came from, it is not a finding, it is a rumour you happen to believe. That does not mean you throw it away. It means you label it honestly as unsourced until you can prove it.

What a Citation Actually Needs.

It does not have to be formal. It has to answer four questions: what was the record, where is it, what did it say, and when did you look at it. Nineteen hundred census, Kings County New York, sheet twelve, household of Giovanni Esposito, viewed on FamilySearch, with the date. That is enough.

How to Cite Grandma.

A conversation is a source and it gets cited like one. Told to me by Rose Esposito, her daughter, in a telephone call on this date. Now the fact has a name attached and a reliability you can judge. That is the whole reason Part 2 told you to write down who said it.

Part 2: Ask While You Still Can

One Folder Per Family.

On your computer, make one folder per surname, and inside it one folder per couple. Everything about that household lives there: the scans, the photographs, the sheets, the notes. When you can find a family's folder in two seconds you will actually keep using the system.

Name the File So It Sorts Itself.

Name a file so it tells you what it is without being opened. Surname, given name, year, record type. ESPOSITO Giovanni 1900 census. Files named that way sort themselves into chronological order per person, and image zero zero four seven tells you nothing.

Back It Up Somewhere Else.

Your tree on FamilySearch is backed up by FamilySearch. The scans, the recordings and the notes on your laptop are not backed up by anybody. Put a copy in cloud storage or on a drive you keep somewhere else. Decades of work has been lost to one failed hard drive.

When Two Records Disagree.

Sooner or later you will have two birth dates for one person. This is normal and it is not a problem to be deleted. Record both, with both sources, and write one line on which you believe and why. A census age given by a neighbour is weaker than a baptism register written at the time.

Never Delete the Losing Evidence.

Keep the record you decided against. It is the evidence that your conclusion was a judgement rather than a guess, and if better information turns up later it is the thing that tells you what to reconsider. Research that hides its own contradictions cannot be checked by anyone, including you.

Write it down while you know it.

Pick one ancestor you already have and write their sheet properly: surname in capitals, maiden name, full dates, full places, and a source line for every fact. It takes ten minutes and it will show you how much of your tree is currently a rumour. We are here when you get stuck.