Cluster research or Fan Club research. Do you do this kind of research to tell your family story? I have talked about this before. You know, in part it is going a page or 2 back and forward when finding family in the documents, especially census reports. But is it more than that?

I was reading, The Family Tree Problem Solver 3rd Edition by the late Marsha Hoffman Rising and updated by Sunny Jane Morton and Diahan Southard and I got to the chapter on “Researching Friends, Associates, and Extended Family Members.” It brought up the concept in a way that I had not considered before. This kind of research is important when you are solving a difficult family connection, but it also puts the individual in the context of a community. You get to know the family, the community relationships, the interactions that make that individual human, not just a name on a page.

So here is my other wondering, what about one-name studies and one-place studies. One-name studies, as I understand them, are researching all occurrences of a surname. This would be consistent with cluster research in that one approach to cluster research is to list all the individuals with the same surname in a county and research them. Doing this means lots of documents and not all the individuals are part of the same family and not all family members live in the same county, state, or country. Nor do all family members have the same surname. According to the WikiTree One Name Project, the purpose of this kind of research is for name origins, name meanings, frequency and distribution of a surname, migration patterns and name variations. (www,wikitree,com/wiki/Project:One_Name_Studies)

One-place Studies are like the name studies except that they, obviously, focus on a community. It involves looking at history, demographics, social history, economics, weather, etc. It, like the name studies, can help with challenging family history but also helps to tell the broader story of the family, why they moved, what they chose to do and why, etc. (GenealogyBank.com/blog/genealogy-101-one-place-studies by Gena Philibert-Ortega)

I hope this doesn’t just sound like rambling. In my head I am trying to make sense of the different approaches or combination of approaches. Like any new idea, I think more information is needed. Before you can compare approaches, you must thoroughly understand each. Just like when you compare documents you are using to research your family, you must understand the documents you are looking at. What was the purpose for creating the document? Who created it? How does it relate to the facts you already have?

Guess what else all of this does? Slows us down! I say that as a good thing. This is not a race to see who can finish their family history first, says the high school sprinter whose father raced a horse as a high school fundraiser. It is a mystery, a puzzle to be solved. A complete story to be told.

There is plenty more learning to be done on these subjects. Perhaps classes for next year at HQRL. If you have knowledge on any of these approaches and would like to present a class, please let me know. I am looking for speakers and would like some “home grown”.

Heidi Geise, education@hqrl.com