To keep track of the data, and to be able to visualize the information I was dealing with, I successfully used a mind map on this project. I shared a very zoomed out view in a previous post. I identified 12 George Long candidates! I had to figure out some way to keep track of them, determine which George Long a particular record belonged to, and compare information so I could eliminate the wrong men.

I have not used mind maps much in my previous work. They just didn’t seem to apply to projects I was working on as well as another tool did. When I am writing, I usually start with an old school outline. That’s just how I was trained in my early english writing classes, and it stuck with me and makes the most sense to me. However, it was not working when it came to dealing with all of the George Longs. I had many documents and needed to be able to distill them down to individuals. A mind map worked great for this.

Here is a zoomed in section of my mind map for candidates numbered 1 and 2.

As I collected data from documents, and as I could determine who they belonged to, I added them as a “bubble” to my mind map. The colors didn’t mean a lot except to depict a different type of record, and I wasn’t necessarily consistent. The red bubbles were the starting point information and any records I could tell belonged to the same man.

Keep in mind, the mind map evolves over time. You’ll notice that there is a note in the image above about the 1840 census for a George Long in Columbiana County, that the correct man was found in Coshocton in 1840. That note came later, of course.

As I was working, I would suspect that two men I had were actually the same man, so I would make notes to that effect, such as the question in this image. “Is Candidate #8 the same man as Coshocton George?”

Then I would do more research to answer that question.

I would go around and around with questions and research until I felt like I had a solid understanding of who each man was and why they are not the “correct” George Long.

Again, keep in mind you are seeing the last version of this before I started writing. This was used as the outline to write up my final findings on the George Long project. The mind map, in my use of it, is never meant to be a final product. I would not publish a mind map as a visualization of my research. It is just for my own organization and visualization of the information gathered.

Next time we will look at the timeline I created for this project. It was the other major tool I used to prove which George Long was the correct George Long. Until then…