If I weren't so exhausted. My freelance work came through for me, and what should be easy wasn't and what shouldn't have taken very long did oh well it will mostly be over tomorrow. I have tried the blogging thing before but didn't really go anywhere with it. But today I was able to wordsmith a great idea of what I want to do with my little corner of the net. Now with that over with, let's talk about my mom's favorite son. Me. I'm also her only son, but what I wanted to get at was "Why did I choose genealogy, especially since I don't really have that much experience?" Well it's simple, it's that exact reason I started.
My diving board into genealogy was a desire to learn more about the man my father called Dad. I knew he served in the war on a submarine. I knew he died when my dad was young and the more I thought about it the more I thought he may have had a family before my dad's. I simply wanted to learn more about him. That's it. Then I got on ancestry.com and now I want to know everything about my roots. Okay it wasn't quite that fast. My uncle caught wind of my research and then he sent me a link to a distant branch of my family that I wasn't familiar with and I was now hooked on giving some effort to that side of the family. Then I committed a form of suicide, I started reading beginners guides. I read Dummies Guide to Internet Genealogy 5th Edition, then the updated 6th edition came out (so I bought it--I let my dad borrow it). Then I read Emily Croom's The Sluethbook for Genealogists. Then I trashed my previous work and started over. I started watching the TV show Who Do You Think You Are? Then I read the companion book of the same name. So at this point the lesson learned during my first attempt to find info on my grandpa was there is no way to do this without a paper trail. It's critical. With out it you will get stuck on a Mobius strip of a data trail, your stuck following the same six documents recorded on various websites in various degrees of detail. See a future post on the lessons learned here!
So a few beginner guides, vlogs, and even genealogy seminars later everything told me to "cluster research" and "document everything". Still not liking the paper trail, I turned to genealogy software. There is a lot out there so do some research (I still haven't decided on one yet so I am looking at (arguably) the big three: Family Tree Maker 2012, Legacy 7.5, and RootsMagic 5). So I plugged my data in and started documenting everything. That launched my next round of research. I read Elizabeth Shown Mills Evidence! it contained a section on accurate and meaningful analysis of available data. This made me realize that just because I matched a name didn't mean it was accurate or true or even mine. And although there were some excellent examples of citations what the software was asking for kept not making sense to me. Ms. Mills has since expanded her Evidence into the definitive citation guide Evidence Explained! A massive tome and a must have for any Genealogist. But it didn't really clear anything up for me.. So as I was wrestling with that this blog was formed. Well that and the third lesson from the beginners guides, keep a research journal. So drop me a note and let me know where your from what your working on and what you wish you had known from the beginning.
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