RLP 111: FamilySearch and the GPS

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 111: FamilySearch and the Genealogical Proof Standard. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (40s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer, and I’m here with accredited genealogist, my mother, Diana Elder. Hi, Diana, how are you?

Diana (56s):
I’m doing really well. I’m excited to be back to work after a little vacation, going to a wedding with you and getting away for a little bit was fun.

Nicole (1m 9s):
Yeah, that was fun to see our cousins. Today we’re talking about FamilySearch and the Genealogical Proof Standard. But before we do that, let me do our listener spotlight. It’s from Dan and after listening to our podcast episode about managing multiple online trees, he sent us a tip that he uses, “I want to thank you for your consistently useful and entertaining podcast. I’m more productive when I follow your Research Like a Pro methodology. I have a comment about your recent managing family trees blog post. I’ve been happily using a public official tree and a private research tree for a while, just like you described in the post, but between completely private and completely public I sometimes have need to be able to share my in-process research with collaborators.

Nicole (1m 56s):
What works best for me is to have one research tree per DNA cluster in addition to my regular research tree. This approach makes it easier for me to spot shared surnames and shared individuals as I build out match trees to find a presumed connection. Usually I share the cluster research tree with researchers whose trees I’ve managed to connect. Each cluster research tree starts out with a bunch of disconnected trees in it, copied from the public trees linked to DNA tests in the cluster. I make navigating in a cluster research tree a bit easier by adding a custom ancestry tag, actively researching to each person who has a DNA match. This shows me the roots of every disconnected tree, something otherwise hard to get.

Nicole (2m 40s):
If you work much with cluster DNA matches, this might be helpful for you too.” I think that is really helpful. And I think you’re right, Dan, that sometimes we need to have a tree that we can collaborate on other with that’s in progress. So that’s a really great point. And I’m really glad you shared your process for doing that.

Diana (2m 59s):
Yes, thank you. I’m actually working on a client project right now where I am working with identifying different clusters. And I really liked that idea. I think it’s so interesting to hear other people organize their research. There’s always some little tip that we can incorporate into our own. We really hope that all of you listening are doing that with this podcast, taking the things that we say and then incorporating them into your own research. So today we’re going to talk about the FamilySearch family tree. I think it’s really important for us to think about some ways that we can improve the FamilySearch family tree. And one of those is by applying the Genealogical Proof Standard to it.

Diana (3m 45s):
So this whole thought about the FamilySearch family tree and the Genealogical Proof Standard came about when I was teaching people in my church classes how to use FamilySearch and, you know, whenever you are trying to change something, you’ll get a little box that comes up that says, what is your reason for making this change? And they would always look at me kind of with a question, like what should I type in this box? And about the same time that I was teaching this class, I was working on accreditation and I had been studying the Genealogical Proof Standard and applying that to all of my work.

Diana (4m 25s):
And so I found myself saying things like, well type in that this provides evidence for the marriage or evidence for the father-child relationship. And I found that I was using the terminology from the Genealogical Proof Standard and those reasons statements. And it seemed to help them to kind of get a sense of what they needed to really put in there. And so I decided to take each of the parts of the Genealogical Proof Standard and make an application to the FamilySearch family tree. And so that’s what we’re going to talk about today. I think it’s kind of fun to look at it in this new light, because it really does help us to see that the things that we’re typing into those little boxes are the work we’re doing on FamilySearch family tree doesn’t have to just be busy work.

Diana (5m 18s):
It can really be meaningful, work that as we are trying to make this a tree that is accurate and to provide proof and evidence of the relationships and the facts that we’re putting on there.

Nicole (5m 32s):
Absolutely. I think as a collaborative tree, where all the users are working on the same tree, it’s important to apply the proof standard and make sure that we’re telling why we’re changing things so that other people who are watching that can understand our reasoning. So where does the Genealogical Proof Standard come from? Well, you’ve probably noticed in the past, if you’ve been a family history researcher for awhile, that you would like to know the origin of family group sheets, pedigree charts, documents, photos that you’ve received from others, you’ve probably wondered how do I know if this is accurate and what do I do if there’s a conflict?

Nicole (6m 14s):
And then how do you determine if somebody is conclusion or your own conclusion is proven? So if you’ve ever had any kind of these questions, then you also will recognize the need for a standard to measure genealogical conclusions. So the Board for Certification of Genealogists recognize this need and from 1997 to 2000, they decided to bring this Genealogical Proof Standard to life. And there are five components of the proof standard. And when we follow these five components it helps our work to be more credible. So the first one is reasonably exhaustive research.

Nicole (6m 54s):
Number two is complete and accurate source citations. Number three is analysis and correlation. Number four is resolution of conflicting evidence. And number five is a written conclusion.

Diana (7m 8s):
Right. And I think at some nice that those are concise because you can literally have those written out in front of you if you wanted to and see how you’re doing as you’re doing your genealogy work. So let’s break those down a little bit and we’re going to use an example of my Royston family, Robert C Royston and his profile page on FamilySearch. I just always think it’s easier to talk about something, having a concrete example and so we’ll just use him. So let’s talk about this very first component of reasonably exhaustive research.

Diana (7m 48s):
It’s funny because when I would teach my class and I would say something like that, people would just laugh because they thought that that just meant that I was talking about researching until you were exhausted, which sometimes we do feel like we are doing, but reasonably exhaustive research just means that we have looked at everything that has the potential to give us an answer to our research question. And if we don’t do this, then we have the risk that something new will overturn a too hasty conclusion. So I just have to comment again and I think I said this on the podcast earlier, you know, in my search to find Cynthia Dillard’s father and I really thought it was George W.

Diana (8m 36s):
Dillard that was the father, but I never felt like I could have proof, you know, absolute proof. And then I had the family Bible pages that one of our listeners emailed me and she had the Bible pages that prove that Cynthia was not the daughter. So there was that undiscovered evidence that would have overturned that conclusion if I had just said, yep, this is, this has gotta be her father. Everything looks like it’s him. So we may think that we have done everything we can, but sometimes that’s tricky to know. So reasonably exhaustive research, how does this apply to the FamilySearch family tree?

Diana (9m 16s):
Well, when we look at our person’s page, there’s a nice list of sources that have been added for each individual. And if this is a new family we are working with, or even if it’s one of our ancestors that we’ve researched a long time, we’ll want to look through that source list and see if we feel like reasonably exhaustive research has been conducted. You know, one of the easy things we can do is see if all the census records for that person’s life has been found. We know the census is started in 1790 and go all the way up to 1944, what we can utilize. So we can look at that and see, do we have every census on there for their life?

Diana (10m 1s):
Do we have marriage certificates, or birth, and death certificates, if they would be available? And so we can get a good overview of their life and see what is on the source list. Now, when I looked at my Robert C Royston, I noticed that there was no birth, marriage, or death certificated listed, and the 1870 and the 1890 census were missing. And also there were two listings of the 1880 census. So this sort of looks like there may be as a lot more research to be done, but in the time period, when he was born and died, there were not death and birth records kept and the marriage record should exist but I found in his wife’s pension application, the exact date, and the courthouse burned a year after the marriage was completed in the county in Texas.

Diana (11m 3s):
And so there is no marriage record from the actual courthouse but there is the marriage date from the pension records. So what can I do with this? You know, I have this knowledge of, of why some of these things are missing. So one way I could show that I have really done a, an, a reasonably exhaustive search for him is to put all my searches into an electronic research log. And then that could be uploaded as a source, and this would let other researchers see what I’ve done and also serve as a reminder for me when I review Robert’s source information. So another thing that I could do instead of uploading a research log would be to add a new discussion.

Diana (11m 47s):
In the discussion I could discuss that information about the birth and death. And so I did, I wrote something like this, birth and death information for Robert Cisnie Royston was attained from his headstone, birth records were not generally kept in Alabama until after 1908 and no death certificate in Stevens county, Oklahoma, his place of burial, was located by the county clerk. So we can write in reason statements that indicate what research has been done and why there wouldn’t be some of these records that you might expect to see with a person’s information.

Nicole (12m 29s):
Good. And I like that, you mentioned the wife of Robert had applied for a pension. And so sometimes doing reasonably exhaustive research for a person includes finding the records that their spouse and children created during their lives, because after Robert died, she had that pension application. So it was created after his life. It wasn’t created by him, but it had helpful information about him. Sometimes we need to expand our personal focus when we are doing that reasonably exhaustive research.

Diana (13m 1s):
Exactly.

Nicole (13m 1s):
All right, let’s talk about component 2, complete an accurate citation in FamilySearch. When you attach a record to a person, it automatically will generate a citation for them. And oftentimes that citation will be absolutely complete and good enough and good to go. The source citations that are generated at FamilySearch are usually pretty good and they follow the Elizabeth Shown Mills Evidence Explained model, but sometimes you will have a source that has not been indexed. So you might find it by browsing, or you might find it on another website and, or you might have ordered a certificate. So you will need to create a sort of citation for that.

Nicole (13m 42s):
So this is important when you’re adding a record, that’s not on FamilySearch in their index records because you’ll want someone else to be able to follow your steps, to find that source. So for Robert C Royston, he was mentioned in the final settlement of his father, Thomas B Royston, and his estate. And so on the microfilm at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City is where this record came from. So the citation to this record should lead the research researchers straight to that record so that they can easily go find it themselves as well. Thomas Jones teaches that we should include five basic elements in our citations and the Genealogy Standards manual also talks about these five things: who, what, when, where in, and where is.

Nicole (14m 34s):
And if you ask yourself those questions about the document or the source, then you can generate a pretty good citation. The citation will include who created it. So in this citation, you would put Alabama probate court, Chambers county, and then you would put description of what it is since it’s unpublished. So settlement records for the years of 1868 to 1884, and the volume number of the book and what page number you viewed, and then which microfilm you like that. So that would be a great citation to include in your work on FamilySearch family tree.

Nicole (15m 16s):
You and, you know, are proving that Robert Royston is the child of Thomas Royston. And I think sometimes we overlook adding citations for parent-child relationships, which are actually some of the most important source citations that we can do. Just remember that when we add those sources and facts that come from sources that are not on FamilySearch, it’s really easy to create a source of both the image, or simply just put in the citation if you’re not uploading the image so that other people can find your record.

Diana (15m 47s):
Exactly. And on Robert C. Royston’s file, I have continued to add to it as I find new information. And the neat thing is about this collaborative tree is that once I upload something for him, like the pension application that his wife did much later, like 15 years after his death, you know, no one else needs to go find that and put that on there because that’s collaborative, I’ve uploaded it. I put the citation, I put the link to the website. It came from, you know, I’ve included notes and the citation. And it’s just so neat that we can work together to create this record of our ancestors.

Diana (16m 31s):
Now we need to talk about the GPS component number three, which is analysis and correlation. And this is one that I think is just so fun. I think it’s really important that we think through these sources and put on our analytical brain, really think about what we are seeing in the information, what it is proving, and then correlating everything, because we’re always going to have some kinds of conflicts or something that we’re going to have to put together. So where can we put our analysis of a source on the FamilySearch family tree?

Diana (17m 13s):
Well, there’s that little box that comes up whenever we are attaching a source. And you know, it’ll say something like, what is the reason you’re attaching this worse? And that’s a great place to state the evidence provided by the source. So when I am working with someone who’s new to family history, and that little reason box pops up, I always like to ask the question, what do we learn from the source? How reliable is the source, who was the informant or person who gave the information and that, that gets them thinking about the source. And so those are some things that we can put into the reason statements, some of those ideas.

Diana (17m 58s):
So as you were saying, Nicole, I don’t have that birth certificate directly stating the father of Robert Cisnie Royston and so I had to assemble some pieces of evidence, like the 1860 census. He’s in the household with his father but as we know, the 1860 census does not list relationships. So it’s always possible that he could have been another relative, not necessarily a son, but absolutely it could be a son. So when I put the reason statement in there, I just said the 1860 census shows Robert C Royston in the household of Thomas B Royston, although it is probable that he has a son, because the census doesn’t list relationships to the head of household, it is not certain, you know, that may seem like that’s kind of a long, complicated statement, but if someone were to read that, it would educate them a little bit about that census if they had never thought of that possibility.

Diana (19m 1s):
So it also gives us an opportunity as genealogists to educate a bit when we’re putting in good reason statements, and helping those who are just learning about sources and how those work. I also try to correlate that census with other censuses. Robert’s in the household in 1850 and 1860 in the household of Thomas B Royston, but he’s missing in the 1870 census, which is so common with the Southern ancestors that census missed so many after the Civil War. And then in the 1880 census, almost as if to make up for him being missed in the 1870 census, he’s actually enumerated twice with his household, which is kind of fun.

Diana (19m 49s):
Sometimes you see that in your families, if they moved within that census taking time period and get enumerated twice. And then in 1883, like you mentioned in the settlement record of his father’s estate, he’s mentioned living out in Texas. So that settlement record connects the Alabama Robert C Royston to the Texas Robert C Royston. So all these different things pull together to connect these two seemingly different Roberts. And so that means to be all pulled together, to show proof, otherwise, someone just looking at the list of sources, you know, wouldn’t want to go in and figure all that out.

Diana (20m 29s):
So we can add correlation in just a simple reason statement, or maybe we want to add something more detailed in a discussion, or we even have the opportunity in the life sketch to write out a really good little proof summary of all the sources. Some of there are several opportunities for us to write things on a person’s detail page, and there’s really no right or wrong way or place to explain our reasoning and to correlate and analyze all of the sources. But I think it’s just important we do it somewhere and each case will be a little different depending on the sources and the evidence that we need to write something.

Nicole (21m 11s):
Yes, it’s key to have some written analysis and correlation. Even you can just write it all out in your research report or in your proof argument and upload that document to the documents section of a person and FamilySearch. So there’s so many ways that you can do it. Let’s go to component number four of the GPS, resolution of conflicting evidence. This is where we go through all of the items that we have in our pile of evidence. And we discuss which pieces we can throw out because they’re not as reliable as others. And then all remaining evidence should point to the same conclusion. We’re going to find a lot of conflicts as we do reasonably exhaustive research.

Nicole (21m 53s):
We’ll find names that are a little different, dates that maybe aren’t the same for the same event, and some records that don’t really make sense. So we need to acknowledge these conflicts and resolve them. And if we don’t acknowledge them or resolve them, then our conclusion isn’t really that credible and people might wonder how we got to our conclusion. So in the case of Robert Royston, there’s some conflicting evidence from the 1880 census, like Diana mentioned, his household is enumerated two times, both in Johnson county, Texas. And the first one was in June 7th and the other one was on June 26th and they’re living in different precincts.

Nicole (22m 37s):
So it would seem that the family moved between the two dates. But what’s interesting is that there’s different information for their four-year-old daughter in one of the enumerations, her name is recorded as Mary Royston, and on the other one she’s enumerated as Clemsy Carpenter and doing reasonably exhaustive research revealed that this was the same child, but was a stepdaughter to Robert from his wife, Isabelle’s, first marriage. In learning about her it seems that she went by the nickname Clemsy and that her father’s surname was Carpenter, but her first name really was Mary, and sometimes children take on the surname of their stepfather, or it just depends on who was giving the information to the census taker.

Nicole (23m 25s):
So it could take an explanation on FamilySearch family tree for another person to understand that discrepancy. So once you’ve figured it out and resolve the conflict, then you can add that information on the pertinent source in the notes section. And this is a really good place to explain the conflicting information. So every source that is attached in FamilySearch, you are able to edit that and add notes to it in our blog post, that goes along with this episode about FamilySearch and the GPS, you can look at the screenshot of how that looks, but basically it has the title of the source, the link to it, the citation, and then the notes. And sometimes in the notes, it’s a good idea to put a transcription of the record and then just do a little discussion of any analysis or conflicts that you find that you have to resolve.

Diana (24m 17s):
I think it’s really fun to go in and add a little bit of extra details. And I am just looking at the source and with that double enumeration of the 1880 census, I did write a little explanation because otherwise it might be really confusing to someone to look at that and see that they were enumerated twice. And it’s kind of fun to compare the two censuses. I always use this as an example in my census class about the informant, because in one it seems really formal and the other one is really informal. And so it’s pretty clear that the informant was different for the two different censuses.

Diana (24m 58s):
And I’m guessing that maybe Robert was the informant for one, and then his wife was the informant for the other. So I just wrote a little statement that says the family is listed twice on the 1880 census. In this enumeration on 7 June,1880 Mary is listed as a daughter, age four, and on the enumeration on 26 June a Clemsy Carpenter is listed as “other” age 4. This conflicting information can be resolved with the understanding that Robert’s wife, Isabel was first married to a Carpenter and Mary “Clemsy” is his daughter, so that anybody looking at that won’t try to add Clemsy as another child of the family, because she’s already there as Mary.

Diana (25m 38s):
It’s a great thing to do to go in and add our reasoning, which brings us to the GPS component number five, a written conclusion. This is where we can write everything out. And this makes sure that in our minds, things are clear and that we are not basing our conclusion on any bias that we might have or preconception, you know, kind of like with my example of Cynthia Dillard, being the daughter of George W. Dillard, sometimes when we researched people for a long time, we just get in our head that this is the way it has to be. And when we write it out, then that kind of points of fallacies that we have been ignoring.

Diana (26m 24s):
And it helps us to see if we have enough proof. Have we done that reasonably exhaustive research so that we can really say that we felt like this is the way something was. So where would we write a conclusion on FamilySearch? So there are several different ways we can do a conclusion. We can just do a simple statement if the evidence from the sources is straightforward, you know, if you’ve got a birth certificate and it’s stating the parents while that’s really easy, and on that source, you just write, this provides evidence of the birth and the parent relationships. But as we’ve talked about a little bit with this example of the Royston family, you might need to do something a little bit longer.

Diana (27m 8s):
Maybe you need to write out a proof summary and put that in the life sketch. Or like Nicole mentioned a complete research report or proof argument and upload that that would have source citations and really go into detail. This is especially important if you have conclusions that are based on indirect evidence or a lot of conflicting evidence to resolve. So those reason statements or the notes in the sources, or discussions, or the life sketch, they’re all so many places that you can write up a written conclusion. And so for Robert Cisnie Royston, our example for today, I actually have things written all over him.

Diana (27m 51s):
I have reason statements and the sources, and then I did put a life sketch so that that’s on his page and if anyone wants to read that they can see it front and center. But then I also have uploaded in his memories section a research report. He was one of my generations for my four generation accreditation report. So I actually have broken it down into three portions and I have a research report for his daughter, and for his father, and for him. So he actually has three generations of reporting on him because he was part of three families, his parents’ family, his own family and his daughter’s family.

Diana (28m 34s):
So I have a lot of things written as you can see on Robert Cisnie Royston, but it’s really satisfying to look at his record on FamilySearch and to see all the research that I did reflected there for anyone else.

Nicole (28m 45s):
Great. Well, I hope that everyone listening will think about if you are a user of the FamilySearch family tree how you can add more reason statements and conclusions to the tree to help meet the Genealogical Proof Standard for a person’s identity. There’s so many things that we put into FamilySearch facts and dates and relationships that we could all certainly do a little better with. So good luck to you.

Diana (29m 13s):
I think that we also need to remember that a person’s record isn’t necessarily ever complete. I look at some of the people on FamilySearch that I’ve worked on and I realized I need to go probably add some more to some of their records so we can always be working to improve it and adding more information, more reason statements, you know, adding a life sketch. We can always do more. A lot of times people will ask when to do this. And so I always recommend that at the end of a research project, that may be you go into FamilySearch and update the record there of an ancestor and include all of your findings, put all the sources on there, write up a conclusion, do everything and get it out there on FamilySearch so that we can help this collaborative worldwide tree get better and better.

Nicole (30m 1s):
It’s a wonderful Tree. And for those of you who haven’t used it before, it’s a wonderful resource, especially when you’re doing DNA research. It’s one of the main places that I look when I’m wanting to find out how I’m related to a DNA match, and they just have a short or a small tree. I’ll often do a quick search in the FamilySearch tree to see if the people in their small tree are in FamilySearch Tree and go back further generations. So it’s a really fast way to find possible common ancestors.

Diana (30m 30s):
Oh, that’s a great point. And the more we all work on it and the better we make it, we are lifting the whole genealogy world up.

Nicole (30m 39s):
All right. Thanks, Diana. I hope that you all have a great week and we’ll talk to you guys again next

Diana (30m 44s):
Week. All right. Bye bye.

Nicole (30m 48s):
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