Last week we visited cemetery research. We learned how to research in cemeteries, where to find on-line resources for them and got a whole page of places to check into. The speaker was very informative about cemetery marker history. The class happened to coincide with the Family Tree Magazine article on Cemetery Research which provided lots of dos and don’ts about researching in the cemeteries themselves.

I didn’t find anything for myself but maybe some of you did. I have discovered things related to cemeteries that has helped like the cause of death in the records and because of the cemetery’s connection to a religion and the time period and location I was able to make the leap to the immigration time and location which I have already written about (Virginia back to Newry, County of Down, Northern Ireland). I have a resource I have used, The Ancestry Detective by Charles Pembroke, and that really says it all. Family historians must be detectives.

I also discovered on FamilySearch that if you go to the right on a detail page of an ancestor, there will be a score for the information. You can see further what you need to do to get a more complete score. Something similar on WikiTree if you go to the first option along the top and go down that list, you come to Tree Aps. You get a tree that is color coded basked on whether it needs further work to connect to the next level. Both helpful next steps.

I have been trying out some AI more directly. I have tried a general question to Google and then either looked at the resources listed after the response from Google and/or followed up with the questions it generated. If you haven’t done that this is the general trajectory: 

• I am trying to connect (this ancestor to this one) in (time period and location)

• Google response and Google follow-up – do you have a surname • My response • Google gives me history and more questions to narrow down the search

• I respond to that and so it goes

By doing that I found by 3x Great-Grandfather connected back to his Great-grandfather and his wife, where they lived and in some cases what they did for an occupation. It also suggested further places to look and offered to help find information. The information included where to look as it seems there is a rather rare (as I understand it) connection again for Scots-Irish from Scotland to eventually Quakers in America as my ancestor married into a very strict Quaker family. I will have to do more digging but I do have a page from a HQRL resource from a Quaker Meeting that supports this lineage.

A wise HQ librarian reminded me recently that perfect may not be what we are looking for when we are talking about records from the 1600s. What we are looking for is connective tissue. Do the dates make sense? Are the resources reliable? Are the names and locations logical? Is there more than one source saying the same thing and are they from different resources?

Well, enough about me, what are you finding? Are you ready for Newspapers?

Heidi Geise, education@hqrl.com