Another step I take when working back through my research from when I was a babe in the genealogical woods, is finding the low-hanging fruit. When I started, there wasn’t a lot online. I wrote letters to libraries and courthouses, genealogical societies, sent forms in for vital records, etc. I think many of us in the field who started in this before the internet for genealogy really took off remember those days. And I think we can all agree that the digital world has absolutely exploded with digitized records.

What do I mean by the low-hanging fruit? The main thing I do is visit the person’s profile on my Ancestry tree and go through the hints. You will most likely find their census, vital records, obituaries, Find a Grave memorials, and so on, in their hints. Now, I do realize that the hints are not always correct and I do not blindly accept every hint on their profile. I carefully examine the ORIGINAL document, correlate that information with my known information, and make a decision from there. I accept the hint (and process the documents as I’ve shared in a previous post in this series) or “ignore” the hint. Ancestry asks why you ignored the hint and I try to give a good answer so they may be able to improve their algorithms over time. If you ignore a hint but later discover it was correct after all, they are not deleted, they are simply found in the “ignored” tab on the hints page. So, there is no harm in ignoring them. It clears out the hints pane.

Sometimes, the hints don’t provide you with some of the records you know should be there. I go searching for them. I generally know what records I should be able to find for my Ohio ancestors since I’ve researched in that state for all of the 25+ years I’ve been doing this. So, if they aren’t served up as hints, I’ll go checking all of my favorite online repositories.

My top “low-hanging fruit” are:

1. Census records
2. Vital Records
3. Obituaries
4. Find a Grave memorials

These records give me the basis for building a biographical sketch or digging deeper into that ancestor. Primarily, in this stage, I’m just trying to fill the gaps left behind when I was a beginner.