Week 9 (May 29 - June 4 2015)

Topics:
1) Conducting Cluster Research
2) Organizing Research Materials - Documents and Photos


Conducting Cluster Research

Thomas MacEntee defines Cluster Research as Friends, Associates and Neighbors (aka F.A.N. Club) concept put forth by Elizabeth Shown Mills.  The FAN Club is part of the community of one's direct line ancestors.  Sometimes to locate an ancestor, one needs to focus on the geographical area where the ancestor lived as well as the locales from and to which they migrated.

Once again, this research practice is one that I have been using to locate those illusive ancestors.  Can't find someone in the index for a census?  Did they move, or was the name mangled by the transcriber?  Sometimes the mangled name is easily found by "playing" with the spelling but sometimes the name has been really distorted for one reason or another.  On the assumption that my ancestor had not moved (farmers tended to stay in the same place), I would take note of a neighbour in the previous or later census and then search for that individual in the census I'm trying to work on.  I have had a good success rate with this method.

In the rural communities, families tend to intermarry.  I learned years ago to always scan the the names on the page of not just the census but also birth, marriages and deaths.  Quite often, I will recognize names of other families in the census or individuals in the case of the BMDs.  Sometimes I do have to reign myself in from following those BSOs.  In the case of census, there have been times that the illusive daughter married the boy next door - I just hadn't found the marriage record to search for that surname.


Organizing Research Materials - Documents and Photos

I have to confess that I have yet to make the time to properly organize some of my genealogy material.  I had things fairly organized at one time, but then with two moves within two years, much of my research has been in boxes.  I've tried to kept them in the boxes until we have been able to set up an office in our current home.  The moves were company moves, done quickly so I was unable to properly box things up.  The hired packers mixed stuff up from the filing cabinet drawers, so boxes needed to be opened to access supplies and research material set aside for later evaluation.  Four years later, we have finally got the office set up to my likely with lots of shelving.  So I will be slowly going through the stacks of papers that have gotten mixed in with financial records. 

Fortunately, after the first move, I had started putting some things into binders and they are now housed on shelving in the brand new office.  I know much of the loose paper are outdated printouts, so they will likely be tossed when I start sorting.  With that knowledge, their sorting is a low priority as I prefer to spend my genealogy time searching current databases.  Especially with participating in this Genealogy Do-Over. 

On a positive note, for several years now I try to do digital rather than paper.  As I save records on my computer, I save them in a systematic way and able to readily find specific documents.  Similar with photos (at least genealogy related ones).

As I start to go through the backlog of paper, I will be "curating" as MacEntee suggests and I suspect I will be disposing of most of the paper.  In the case of material to be kept, I will be filling - either in a file folder or binder, depending on the item.  I have not yet got to the point in my research of ordering documents, so there is little that I need to ensure is stored in archival quality material.