Last week I took one of my potential New Englanders and did the following:

1. Researched background information such as history for the location.
2. Created a timeline that combines both the husband and wife. I included the birth of all the children they had.
3. Did a gap analysis on the timeline. This created questions that I could address one at a time to answer specific issues. Doing more focused research.

Example: I hypothesize that because a child was born in 1834 in Cambridge, Lamoille, VT and the next in 1836 in Homer, Licking, Ohio, that the family moved from Vermont to Ohio between 1834 and 1836. My questions will be to find further evidence that this is the case by looking for property records and to look at historical maps to see how close these places were. Historically what was happening in the area that might help me learn why they might have moved. I could also dig further into the FAN system to see if others moved with them and perhaps that might explain why.

I also found agriculture censuses and population censuses for the same decade in 2 locations which makes me wonder if the locations were on the borders of counties or townships which might explain some of the above.

I have other moves such as Homer to Burlington, Ohio and Ohio to Iowa that follow the same thinking process. Let’s see what light the speaker can shed on where to look.

I have mentioned before that I am a photographer and that I keep finding similarities in the work. I realized in doing the work with the timeline that it is like using a tripod in photography. One of the reasons for using the tripod is to steady the focus which you could say is what the timeline does. It keeps the work focused on your intended question. Another thing it does is slow you down. By slowing down in photography, you avoid just snapping photos randomly which with digital photography is easy to do. It makes you think about where the next composition should come from, the light, etc. Isn’t that what the timeline does? What is the next question, where might I look for the answers, what do the answers tell me, etc.

What can I take away from this week’s speaker? So I did a little scrolling around based on today’s speaker and didn’t find specific information, but I did decide to look at my ancestor’s father. I figured if I could find where he died that might help verify where his son was born. Sure enough, he died in Vershire, Orange, Vermont in 1798 just 2 or 3 years after his son was born. More searching to be done but the parents and children all match my information. It also told me that he either died at sea or was buried at sea. This will be more information to research. What do we say, “find more questions than answers sometimes” but that is the work of a ……detective. It might be time to check those Family Books that our speaker referenced.

American Ancestors is the next class so there may be more on all of this.

Heidi Geise, education@hqrl.com