My Genealogy Strategy

My #1 goal in my new hobby is telling stories. At first genealogy was cool because of all the new data, but after you dig and document long enough it starts to lose meaning. My wife starting poking around on Ancestry.com around the same time as me but burned out after only a few weeks, saying, "After my great-grandparents, it's meaningless - it's just names and dates of people I've never heard of." Rather than feeling the same way and losing steam, this idea just got me more interested in going beyond the facts and finding these people's stories. I love to research the history of what was going on in an area when my ancestors were there, trying to understand what motivated them, how they were molded by the happenings of the day, or how they molded history themselves. That is why I can't quit genealogy. It's just an endless string of stories waiting to be discovered.

So what is important to me as an amateur genealogist? As I have researched my own family history and researched genealogy as a discipline over the past few years, I have developed some strategies I use as I go about building my tree.

• Look for reliable sources and document them. This is something that has become very important to me. The Internet and companies like Ancestry.com have done wonders for genealogy by making so much information readily available to so many, but it has a downside... There is a lot of dubious information out there that has been accepted as fact although there is no real supporting evidence for it. As much as I like Ancestry, they are a chief enabler of this problem with their feature allowing you to cite someone else's tree as a source. This has lead to a rapid proliferation of theories, hunches, and just plain bad data as fact. I love using other people's research for leads and clues, but I insist on getting a reliable source before I put something permanently into my tree. I don't have my own copy of Evidence Explained yet, but I am following its principles for citing sources as much as possible. I also love seeing original documents. Where I can, I will seek out original copies rather than transcriptions. Seeing the real thing makes a connection that brings you that much closer to the people involved and helps me to know their stories. UPDATE: Thomas MacEntee' Genealogy Do-Over blog just had a great post about evaluating evidence and citing sources. On his corresponding Facebook page he posted a handy reference document of source citation templates. I have shared a copy here in my Google Drive.
• Look for context. The people you find when researching your family tree become so much more interesting when you can relate to them. The way we can relate to our ancestors is by knowing the history of the time and place where they lived. Through genealogy I've unexpectedly become a bit of a history buff and will dig through the Internet and my local library to find out as much as I can about the history that surrounded my ancestors' lives. Historical context is an important ingredient to really knowing their stories. This also means that when I'm looking at something like a census record, I'm not just looking at the entries for the people in my tree. I'm looking around them on the same page and on nearby pages to understand what the neighborhood was like. What kind of jobs did people have? Where were they born? How big we're the families? Were kids nearby in schools or working? This kind of poking around on records can also give you some surprising clues with your own family research.
• Look for patterns. As I do my research, I am always on the lookout for patterns. Most frequently, it's migration patterns I'm watching for, as these often help fill in details in the family story. For example, I had a number of Dutch ancestors in New Netherlands leave the area around Albany and start a settlement at what is now Kingston, New York. A few generations later, their descendants can be found near Port Jervis, NY along with descendents of many others who interacted with my family near Kingston. A few generations later, the same can be found in Virginia... What was it that caused these people to move together? What other clues can I uncover by digging into what is driving these patterns? I've got a lot of digging left to do on this, but these kinds of patterns are very interesting to me.
• Look for direct ancestors first. This is really more of an approach than a principle - I am focusing first on following my direct ancestors back the original immigrants to the United States. My goal is first to get back to the ends of those direct branches, then I will focus going further back with international records, and going sideways to fill in more aunts, uncles, and cousins. I will pursue some of these "sideways" branches from time to time, especially when I hit a wall, because those paths can help you find more detail on common ancestors, but it's not my priority for now.