7 Traits that Make a Good Genealogist...

If you don’t like the idea of wandering a cemetery for hours, or spending a day in the archives, or if you hate the smell of old books … let me tell you that family history just isn’t for you. So can I suggest you take up photography, hiking, woodwork, scapbooking or knitting instead. However for those that think the above is a perfect day out … welcome to “the tribe”. You are a fellow totally obsessed genealogist, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all. We feel at ease with fellow genies, as they are part of our ‘tribe’. They ‘get’ us, and don’t eyeroll like the other family members. But what brings us together is our similarity in certain traits. Here’s just a collection of 7 main ones. HAVE PATIENCE – Sitting in a library or archive and scrolling through microfiche, or paging through old record books is not for everyone. But a good researcher will know that you might be there for a day or two (or more), before your find who you’re looking for. That one person you’ve been hunting for years. And some days you don’t find them at all. Family history IS NOT a quick hobby. I know many people who have been been researching for 20, 30, 40 or more years. You may spend days, weeks or years looking for one person … and of course frustration sets in, but when you find them you’re on cloud 9 for a year!! Your patience finally paid off. GET ORGANISED – This is a great trait to have, but it’s not one that comes naturally to many of us. When you start researching you will experience what is known as the “paperwork snowball”. Paperwork...

Well, That Was Disappointing: The Value of “Negative Evidence”...

We’ve all been there. We’ve done searches looking for an ancestor, and simply came up with nothing. We’ve tried numerous alternate spellings. Eliminated the date. And even omitted the parents names. And still Zip. Zilch. Nada. In fact the name you were searching doesn’t even appear. Or anything even remotely like it. So what now? Some would say that they’ve wasted time, effort and money, but in reality this couldn’t be further from the truth. What you’ve done is find “negative evidence”. In effect you are eliminating sources. So then narrowing down your search list. Negative Evidence is far more valuable that most give credit for, so don’t ever discard this information. Record it in a research log, noting down your search term, what (book, website, journal, archive etc) you searched, what you found (or not), and the date. If is is a website, you might want to note to recheck it later, as we all know new records do get added online regularly. An added bonus with a Research Log is that you can see exactly what you found (or didn’t find) when. So when you pick up that line a couple of years later, you don’t have to repeat all the same searches (unless they’re websites of course). And if you don’t have a Research Log as yet, you’ll find some great Research Log Templates over on Cyndi’s List which you can download and printout for free. So while it’s not as exciting as finding your ancestor, NEGATIVE EVIDENCE really is a GOOD thing. Try it. You’ll be amazed at how much time it can actually save...

The Importance of a Catalogue...

Catalogues. Where would we be without them? How would you go buying something from your local store if they didn’t advertise what they had? Or how would you know if your local library had a book you were after? You wouldn’t. It would be a hassle to have to go to search through everything yourself. And in the busyness of life these days, we need more hours not less. Putting it simply we rely on catalogues (online or printed ones) to know what is available, and where. In the cases above, the store or the library. But in reality it applies to anything. To put this into a direct personal context I shall put my ‘work hat’ on. Now many of you will know that I work for Gould Genealogy & History. Started about 38 years ago by my parents, this is Australia’s largest genealogy retail/webstore, and I can guarantee that if we didn’t have catalogues we wouldn’t be in business. Pretty much right from the beginning we had printed catalogues to list the products that we sold. Then moving on a number of years, we jumped into the world of websites, which was just as well, as our range had grown to be about 11,ooo products and was impossible to list it all in a printed catalogue anymore. But the need to list everything was still there, so our website became our “complete catalogue”, and changes regularly. So why am I even talking about catalogues? I was reminded of just how important it is for a group, society, museum etc. no matter how big or small it is to catalogue your products. But for me it doesn’t stop there. For me to know that a group in another...

Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge: S is for … Searching...

As has happened many times throughout this Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge already, I changed my mind of what to write about for this letter. I was going to write about the Star of New Zealand ship, but have decided to save that one for another day. So now … S is for SEARCHING Putting it simply genealogists are searchers. We are detectives, we hunt down all the clues and piece them together one by one, which ultimately makes our family history, and to help us do this we use the internet, naturally. But with the many, many millions of genealogy websites, big and small, together with all the message boards, forums, blogs out there just how do you find what you’re looking for? The answer is to learn the art of searching … that’s how. Because HOW you search can radically change the results you get, and help narrow your focus. So lets start with the obvious one …  GOOGLE ——————————————————– Here’s an example you can try with me, lets say we’re looking for some cemetery records: 1. Type the word cemetery records australia in Google’s search box, and it comes up with 21,200,000 results – now I don’t know on ANYONE that actually wants to go through that many webpages, so obviously you’ll need to narrow down your search some more. (Note the number of search results can vary depending on which version of Google you use, and I’m using Google.com.au) 2. The second step is to narrow it down further. As I’m looking primarily in South Australia, I’ll change the word Australia to “South Australia”, and see what comes up: cemetery records “south australia” gives 310,000 results. 3. Quite often you’d then look through at least the...