Category Archives: Genealogy Tools

Full Text Search Finds – More Misfiled Papers

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I’m working on an project adjacent to my George Long project. I want to identify his wife’s parents, or at least her father. Her name was Isabella McCullough. A will was located for a Hugh McCullough leaving things to his daughter Isabella Long. A slam dunk, right? Um no. These people are trying to take away my last remaining brain cells, I think. I have found TWO Isabella McCulloughs who married Long men, one to my George Long, and one to James Long. I am not sure if or how James Long is related to my Longs, but that is another story.

The main point of this post is to highlight the amazing perk from FamilySearch’s Full Text Search that I hadn’t anticipated, but makes total sense. We can find papers that have been misfiled! I posted about another couple of examples of this before, but just came across another one. In the midst of Hugh McCullough’s estate papers, are several papers that clearly belong to a different estate, that of John Abraham of Jefferson County, Ohio.

A few images later, we find the Estate of John Abraham.

If we were researching John Abraham, unless we examined every page of the microfilm, every file in the courthouse, every image on the digital film, we would have missed this! The images that belong in John Abraham’s file start at image 139 and end on image 145. The pages consist mostly of receipts and the inventory list of the estate sale. Documents I like to see for my ancestors.

FamilySearch just filmed the pages as they were contained in the folders, so this misfiling happened sometime before the filming. I couldn’t find a beginning placard on this digital set that might have clued me in to the year of filming. It doesn’t really matter. The point is, this happened (and still happens). Papers get misfiled all the time, and are then “lost” because they are not in the right folder. They have been “lost” to us researchers, but they are now findable again because of the Full Text Search. Amazing!

Full-Text Search Finds Another One

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In my last post, I said I was going to go over some of the basic how-tos and some tips I’ve learned. However, I have another example of how amazing this tool is.

Working on my client’s Gallimore family from the last post, I needed to try to prove a father-son connection. One great place to look for that kind of link is in probates, wills, and estate files. Using Full-Text Search, I found the Gallimore will quickly and easily. However, when I went to formulate my citation, I realized that I likely wouldn’t have found this estate packet if it weren’t for the Full-Text Search!

The estate states that the heirs of Isom Gallimore, deceased, are to receive his portion of William Gallimore’s estate. That is not the important part of this story, just a little bit of background. It turns out that these estate papers were filed in the middle of another probate packet!

Here is the file folder of Michael Garoutte, image 411 of 625:

On image 421, we find the first of several pages of the Gallimore file:

Then, on image 431, we are back to the Garoutte file:

Are there more Gallimore papers elsewhere in this film roll? Possibly. I found what I needed for the purposes of my original search. However, again, it was when I went to begin crafting my citation for the one piece of paper I wanted to reference that I discovered that I had found something that is probably lost. Maybe these missing documents are part of why my clients’ family have had so many brick walls with this family.

It makes me think of this image I found for my own ancestors:

I’m going to have to go back and use the Full-Text Search to see if I can find William Long’s file stuffed into someone else’s packet!

Full-Text Search Finds

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You may have heard about the FamilySearch Labs “Full-Text Search” already. If not, I’m shocked. It has rocked the genealogical community’s discussions in online forums for months and months now, and it is growing by the hour. The Full-Text Search “for historical records uses artificial intelligence (AI) to transcribe images into text so they can be fully searched. This feature is meant to save hours previously spent manually reviewing thousands of images for an important piece of information—that can be found almost instantly with an automated search.” This new technology takes handwritten documents and scans them, creating fully-searchable text transcriptions. Searching is no longer limited to just an index, but the entire document!

Because your search is not limited to indexes any longer, names found in the middle of another document can now be found. You may find your ancestor listed in someone else’s deed, will, court record, or other document, possibly in a document you would have never thought to examine! But there is it. From time to time I plan to share documents I’ve found, that I wouldn’t have found otherwise, to showcase the power of this new technology.

Here is an example of what I mean. I was looking for a marriage record in Clinton County, Ohio, for Isom Gallimore. I knew he should have been married in about 1821 from other research. However, my examinations of the books covering that year did not turn up a record. Using the Full-Text Search, I found the record quickly! Amazing. But why? What is going on that stopped me from finding it where it should have been?

The following page is roughly in the middle of the book and clearly shows that these marriage licenses are from 1821 according to the top of the first column.

Looking forward and backward in the book, I noticed something. This is the last license in the book. It was recorded in 1817.

I also noted that the FamilySearch label for the book states the book covers 1810-1817.

What is going on here? Looking closely at the pages, you can see that they have been put into an archival sleeve or a lamination-type of preservation material (likely using the processes called “encapsulation” and re-set into a book cover.

The link for this page is: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSHP-C4VS

Using Full-Text Search, I was able to find this record which is obviously in the wrong book based on the dates and labels. Some of the page numbers have been lost to the torn and worn edges. Someone wrote in new page numbers in pencil on most corners. It looks to me like someone did their best putting a book back together that may have fallen from a shelf and the pages spilled all over.

Without Full-Text Search, I may have never found this record. I may have if it were important enough for me to go through every book and read every page. This was for a client project and they rarely want to pay us for the time it takes to do that level of searching. However, with Full-Text Search, we are far more likely to be able to find documents that are hiding from us or that we may not even know exist in the first place.

As I find examples of this, I plan on sharing them in this blog. My next blog will walk through some of the steps and tips I’ve learned along the way. The new technology is amazing. I can remember thinking, after OCR technology became readily available, that it would not likely happen to be able to train a computer how to read handwriting. I’m so glad I was wrong!

Top Tools I Use: Project Management

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I have a lot of irons in the fire at any one time. Between client work, volunteer positions, speaking arrangements, and personal projects, I have a lot to keep track of. There are a lot of tools that can be used for this. I like Asana. It allows me to make categorized lists, with subtasks, and calendar reminders.

asana1

I find the interface to be easy to understand and set up. In the image above you can see some of my categories: Lectures, Volunteer Tasks, Calls for Papers, Personal Genealogy, Articles to Write. I also have a category for Client Projects, general business admin, and so on.

The sub-tasks allow you to keep track of more details. I use this most when there are smaller tasks to be finished as part of a larger project. For example, in the image below, you can see that I for upcoming speaking agreements, I keep track of when various contracts, forms, bio and headshot, syllabus and other materials are due. I also keep track of whether I’ve made travel and hotel arrangements, and any other details. You can also attach files and links.

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Asana makes completing your to-do items fun by also playing cute animations when you click off your items.

gamification-asana-unicorn

There are many online videos, tutorials, and help files that help you get into the details of Asana. See some of these for more:

Tools like Asana can help you stay on top of all of your tasks. With so many tasks, projects, and responsibilities, I couldn’t live without it. Well, I could, but I’d be much more disorganized.

Top Tools I Use: Time-tracking

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Whether you take clients or do genealogy as a hobby, I highly recommend you track your time on various tasks. I keep track daily of all my time spent on working (clients, administrative, marketing, writing proposals, etc.) and on volunteer tasks for the various societies I’m involved in. Then I can determine where I’m spending too much time or not enough time. My favorite tool for time-tracking is Toggl.

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Above is the main workspace for Toggl on the website version. You can use the timer or enter time manually. You can set up clients (I have clients by name as well as the societies I’m involved in), set up projects, and then describe the particular task you are working on. You can see the top item on my example is “Blog post” (writing this very post), the “project” and the “client” both being GenPants, my business. You can see some other examples as well.

On the left are some options, the one I use most is “reports” which allows me to see how much time I’ve given to any given client or project over a period of time. You can choose by week, month, or year, or input a set of dates. I tend to do this at the end of the year or quarter when I reevaluate my goals and where to spend my time.toggl-desktop

Toggl also has a desktop application which I have open usually in the bottom right of my screen. I simply click on and off as I change between tasks throughout the day.

Keeping track of what you’ve done throughout the day, whether for work, personal, hobby, or volunteer, can help you tighten up your productivity or convince you that you did get some things done even if it doesn’t always feel like it at the end of the day. And it can help you reevaluate where you spend your time.

Top Tools I Use: Screenshots

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As a speaker, I often find myself needing to make screenshots, and annotate them with arrows or underlines. I also often use screenshots in client reports to help educate or inform the client. It is also handy to be able to add screenshots to emails, research logs, notes, and more. My favorite screenshot tool is Snagit by TechSmith (not an affiliate link).

snagit

In the above screenshot, you can see the interface. In the large part of the screen is the working surface. The screenshot can be annotated by adding arrows, boxes, text, blur (to retain privacy), and other shapes. Along the bottom is a deck of previous screenshots. And along the right side is the menu where you can choose your tools, determine how wide or narrow the lines should be, the colors, and so on.

One of the things I use it for in my personal research is to create a list from a database, such as a list of hits in a census search, and then using the screenshot tool to keep track of what I looked at and which can be eliminated. The following is an example from a search for “Renfro” in Barren County, Kentucky in the 1850 census.

example-snagit

There are other features that I have not used as much such as video capture, that could be used if you wanted to demonstrate using a website or something along those lines. The TechSmith website has excellent tutorials and help pages.

I find Snagit to be very easy to use, intuitive, quick, and handy. There are probably others screenshot tools out there that you enjoy. The main point here is not necessarily to use Snagit itself, but to bring attention to how useful a screenshot tool can be. I use it nearly every day, largely to create slides in my presentations.

The screenshot can enhance whatever you are working on by providing more explanation to your audience or yourself through the use of arrows, lines, boxes, text, and more.

Top Tools I Use: Note-taking

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I have had people ask me about various tools when I teach classes or deliver lectures/seminars that I thought I’d share some of those through my blog along with any tips I think of along the way. To read last week’s post click here. Enjoy!

Genealogists take a lot of notes. Notes from a research project. Notes from presentations and institutes attended. Notes on DNA projects. Notes on recipes, Christmas lists, quilting patterns, books to read, movies to watch, and so on. I have notes in a lot of places: notebooks of varying shapes and sizes, binders, napkins and scraps, and on my computer in a variety of programs. However, I have made a concerted effort to get all of those old notes into one location: Evernote.

Evernote allows you to title, tag, create notebooks, stack notebooks, add PDFs and images, create tables, and more. All of this functionality allows for many different ways to keep your stuff organized. You can also do a keyword search in Evernote so even if you don’t have a tag on a note, you can search by keywords and find what you are looking for. You can also create links of notes so that you can link one note to another. I love this feature for my research plans and logs (plogs I call them) and allows me to keep the log in one place, and notes on findings in another so all I have to do is click on the link I created to pull up the note with the images I made or the notes I took.

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In the image above there are several links, those in green link to another Evernote note whereas the blue links point to webpages. Evernote also has “dark mode” which is much easier on the eyes.

Evernote can do so much. There are many helpful resources out there. They have an excellent help and learning section of their website, a YouTube channel, and a blog. At FamilyTreeWebinars.com they have an Evernote category with four webinars on the topic.1 Lisa Louise Cooke of Genealogy Gems has a YouTube playlist with her videos all about how to use Evernote for genealogy. I have even written about Evernote before here.

There are other note-taking apps and systems out there. Primarily I wanted to share what I use. But if you prefer another method, by all means. As Nike says, Just Do It. Get your notes organized. Well, maybe Nike didn’t have notes in mind, but you get the idea.

1. This is an affiliate link to FamilyTreeWebinars.com. When you click it, and IF you make a purchase, I get a small percentage back. This is a great way to support my blog. Thank you in advance!↩

Top Tools I Use: Charting

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I have had people ask me about various tools when I teach classes or deliver lectures/seminars that I thought I’d share some of those through my blog along with any tips I think of along the way. Enjoy!

Once you get past your basic pedigree or family group sheet, and especially when working on DNA projects, genealogists find themselves wanting to make a chart that is more complicated and/or more customizable than most genealogy software offers. I have used simple text and boxes in Mac Pages (same can be done in Word), Keynote (same can_LucidChart be done in Powerpoint), and various drawing programs. A friend introduced me to LucidChart and I’ve never looked back! (NOTE: This is NOT an affiliate link or anything. I do NOT get any kind of compensation for sharing this information.)

Lucidchart is very easy to use, intuitive, versatile, and did I say easy? The workspace is very intuitive.

_LucidWorkspace

You can easily add shapes, put text into those shapes, fill the shapes with color, connect the shapes with lines, put text onto the lines, and so much more. There are options for what file type to download your chart as, sharing with others, creating slides for a presentation, and many other fancy options.

I won’t go into the details of how to do everything. There are many resources for learning more about Lucidchart. They have an excellent help section on the website and they have a YouTube channel that features helpful tutorials and some funny videos that demonstrate Lucidchart features.

In genealogy, we run into “pedigree collapse” quite frequently. Pedigree collapse happens when cousins marry cousins such that on two (or more) branches of your family tree you find the same ancestral couple. For example, my parents are fourth cousins. Back in the tree the Meeker family lived next door to the Avery family, and four Avery siblings married four Meeker siblings. So two ancestral couples are actually the same ancestral couple, I have Mahlon Meeker and Frances Cooper on both my mother’s side and my father’s side.parentsrelated

Sometimes this sort of thing gets much more complicated. I am currently working on a project to figure out how the Higdons and the Renfros (and the Renfros) are related. Take a look:

HigdonRenfro-demochart

Now, I know you probably can’t read that text. The point is not to help me with my research project (though if you have Higdons or Renfros in Missouri and Kentucky please email me), but to show you how complicated a chart can get and how easy it is to demonstrate it with Lucidchart. (The yellow boxes are Higdons, the blue are Renfros, and the pink are Willetts. Several Higdons married the Renfro cousins and several Renfros married their Renfro cousins.) And I also know genealogists and you probably REALLY want to see that text. You can see this chart on Lucidchart here.

I use Lucidchart nearly everyday when I’m working on projects for my personal work and for clients. I don’t know what I’d do without it. There is a free level and a subscription level as well. I did very well with the free level for quite some time.

Lucidchart is not the only charting game in town. You might have a tool you prefer. But if you have been struggling with charting, you might give Lucidchart a try. I highly recommend it.