RLP 112: The Value of Family Search Hints

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 112: the Value of Family Search Hints. 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. Let’s go.

Nicole (44s):
Hi everyone and welcome to the show. I’m Nicole and I’m here with my mom, accredited genealogist, Diana Elder. Hi Diana.

Diana (52s):
Hi, Nicole. Fun to be here with you on the podcast today.

Nicole (56s):
So what have you been working on?

Diana (58s):
Well, I’m working on finishing up a project for a client, which has been really interesting. It’s an 1859 adoption case. And so of course we’re having to use some DNA. And so I’m looking at all the records for the family, as well as doing some clustering and seeing what I can do to help this client out.

Nicole (1m 20s):
Very cool. I’ve been doing a lot of DNA as well because I’ve been writing my proof argument for the ProGen study group, and there’s a lot of DNA matches and DNA test takers. And when you get back that far like you are, and that’s 1800s, you really do have to look at a lot of people and a lot of matches to figure it out, hunh?

Diana (1m 41s):
You do because you’re looking at usually the second or third great-grandparent level, and there are a lot of second or third great-grandparents that the DNA matches could come through. And so you are looking at a lot of information, which is why it’s so great that I’ve been using your AirTable base for keeping track of all the DNA work. So thank you again for creating that great base.

Nicole (2m 7s):
I’m glad it’s working for you. Do you have more than one test taker or do you just have the results of one person?

Diana (2m 13s):
I have two.

Nicole (2m 14s):
So did you decide to put in a column for which test taker the match is to?

Diana (2m 18s):
Yes, because they’re brother and sister, but it’s really interesting to see how their matches are different, especially when they’re the smaller matches. They are a lot different. The brother has matches that the sister doesn’t have at that level. So I’m really glad that we’ve got two test takers. That’s going to prove really helpful for the client as they continue working on this.

Nicole (2m 40s):
Definitely. Yes. Have you noticed that on Ancestry, they have started showing the longest segment

Diana (2m 46s):
I have and that is so fun. Yeah. I’ve been just fascinated with that and really excited to have a little bit of segment data. That’s fabulous.

Nicole (2m 56s):
It is nice. I was looking at some of the data from Ancestry and sometimes the longest segment size is longer than the total shared centiMorgans have you seen that?

Diana (3m 6s):
I have. And I’ve been reading a little bit about that in Blaine Bettinger’s, Facebook group, Genetic Genealogy Tips and Tricks, and Ancestry itself has a little bit of an explanation about that. So I think that’s really confusing though. And interesting. And it just goes to show that we are just getting the results that the testing company is pushing out to us and that those can change and the way they interpret our DNA can change.

Nicole (3m 36s):
Yes.

Diana (3m 36s):
We’re just going to have to learn how to work with it now.

Nicole (3m 39s):
Yeah. And every company interprets the DNA a little bit differently. The matching algorithms are different. I’ve noticed that across companies, the same two people will share different amounts because of how it’s calculated. But yes, I read that too on Blaine’s Facebook group, Genetic Genealogy Tips and Techniques, and he was saying that it’s the Timber algorithm that Ancestry applies to the total shared centimorgans, but the longest segment data is before Timber is applied. So I thought that was really fascinating. And it kind of shows how maybe sometimes that Timber algorithm at Ancestry reduces the amount of shared centiMorgans for matches. And I think sometimes it’s good that it does that because those are population segments or really old segments that a lot of people share.

Nicole (4m 23s):
But then at the same time, I questioned it sometimes, especially when the longest segment is more than the shared total. So it’s just something to always be learning more about and trying to understand more about,

Diana (4m 37s):
I agree. I think it’s really fun that anyone doing DNA right now is really on the cutting edge of this technology and using it with genealogy. Cause we’re all just trying to learn. Even the experts are trying to learn. And the testing companies are trying to figure out how best to use the DNA information. So it’s kind of fun. It will be interesting to see what it’s like in 10 years from now, we’ll look back and think, remember when we had to do all of that work and now it’s so easy. I hope we get to that point anyway.

Nicole (5m 5s):
One more thing about DNA before we go on is that I was also using the results of a test taker in my family from 23andMe and I haven’t used 23andMe that much, but this time it was really helpful because there was a cluster of matches that all descended from the hypothesized ancestor on 23andMe and one of them was also on My Heritage. So I was able to figure out her tree pretty well. And then I was able to figure out the other people who she matched and matched my relative, because 23andMe shows you how much your matches share with the other matches too, which is something Ancestry doesn’t show you. So that was really useful because I could see that within this cluster, they were all first, second cousins.

Nicole (5m 47s):
And some of them were like niece, aunt relationships. So it was really helpful to see how they were related to each other.

Diana (5m 55s):
That is great. And that’s exactly how I solve that last adoption case that I did. It was 23andMe and seeing how two people were related to each other, that they were first cousins cause it helps you focus in on that little cluster. It makes such a difference. So anyone who’s listening who has DNA on 23andMe, and maybe you have not been using it really encourage you to go take a look at it because it can really help you solve some problems. I’ve been pretty impressed. Yeah. And make sure

Nicole (6m 23s):
Yeah. And make sure you’re opted into a family matching. If you are in 23andMe just click on the family and friends and then view all DNA relatives. And when you click on one of your matches, so you click on one of your matches and then you scroll down to the very bottom of the match page and then you will find you and so-and-so may have relatives in common and then click find relatives in common and then it opens up the list of all your shared matches. So it’s kind of tricky, kind of hidden to find it, but it’s really a helpful tool for finding these clusters of people who are all related to each other and to you. So check it out.

Diana (7m 1s):
We’ll should we do the spotlight?

Nicole (7m 3s):
Yes, we should move on.

Diana (7m 6s):
We can talk DNA all day, but so our listener spotlight is by RComfort78, who says, “I came to your podcast recently and I’m trying to listen old to new. I listened to this podcast concerning archives just today on 31, July, 2020, what an insightful podcast. I’m more committed to listening more so I can catch up to your new current podcasts. I learned something new in each podcast.” Thank you. Well, thank you listener. I know kind of how you feel when I discover a new podcast that I like. And then I see that there’s so many episodes that I need to catch up on, but it’s kind of fun also.

Diana (7m 46s):
It’s like discovering a new TV series that you just love and then you have something interesting to watch every night. Right?

Nicole (7m 52s):
That’s so true. I sometimes give up on trying to catch up and I just start listening on the current podcast and then sometimes I’ll go back and search through to find one that’s of particular interest.

Diana (8m 3s):
Okay. So I just have to mention here for podcast listeners who are new, we’ve had several people comment that they want to go back and listen to the first podcast again, because that’s where we go into the Research Like a Pro process, but they’re missing on their podcast app because in the settings, a podcast app can delete anything that you’ve listened to. So if your settings are that way, every time you listen to a podcast that will disappear. And so you may want to go change your settings so they don’t disappear. And if you can’t figure that out and can’t find them just know on FamilyLocket all the episodes are there. So you can always go back and listen to them through our website and review some of those.

Diana (8m 48s):
So, just putting that out there so everyone with that problem knows what to do.

Nicole (8m 50s):
Great. All right, well, what are we talking about today?

Diana (8m 54s):
Well, we’re going to continue Our discussion on Family Search today about Family Search Hints. It was so fun last week when we talked about using the genealogical proof standard to make Family Search better. So I thought it would be fun today to talk a little bit about another great tool that Family Search gives us and that is record hints. I thought we would use a case study that came from a blog post probably a couple of years ago, where I discovered a huge mistake I had made in my database and subsequently on Family Search and kind of talk about how the hint led to this new discovery and correcting this big mistake.

Diana (9m 38s):
So we’re going to use this case study of a person named Wilford Royston. This is one of my collateral relatives, that grandson of my direct relative. And I like to work on collateral relatives, especially with DNA, you know, we want to make sure we’ve got those descendancy lines going down correctly so we can figure out who our DNA matches come through. And I also just feel like it’s important for all my ancestors to have their descendants correct. So I’m grateful I was able to correct this mistake and Family Search Hints, where it all started. Well, great.

Nicole (10m 13s):
Let’s talk about Family Search record hints and where you can see them. So they’re pretty similar to the shaky leaves on Ancestry. Basically it’s a record that has been indexed at Family Search and the system has scanned your person’s information and matched it up with record hints that have similar or the same data. So if you go to one of your ancestors’ person pages on Family Search, up in the top right you will see Research Help. In the Research Help section that’s where you’ll see record hints. And you’ll also see other ideas for things you can do for people, like look for born children or attach some sources and things like that.

Nicole (10m 59s):
You can also see record hints when you’re looking at the family tree in the tree view, there are little icons that show up next to each person who has a record hint available for them. So you can do a pedigree view or a portrait view or descendancy view. And the descendency view can show up to four generations, which is really great, especially in DNA research when you’re trying to trace all the descendants of a person down to the DNA matches, it’s really helpful to pull up a descendancy tree and just look at all the names. And sometimes I’ll search through those names, using the control, find to see if I can find what I’m looking for. And then when you see that there’s a record hint for that person that really helps, you know, that that person probably has documentation that helps with that parent child relationship that you’re trying to establish.

Nicole (11m 46s):
And one thing to deal with those record hints is to really check and make sure that all the information matches up correctly. And if you’re not sure if it is a match, you don’t have to attach it. You can wait and you can do some more research. Often people will attach hints, and I’ve done this before, too, where it’s the same country or the same state, but then they actually lived in a different locality. And there were two people with that same name, about the same time period, but in slightly different places. So just be aware that if you have vague or general information for your person, the hints might not be as good. Whereas if you have a more specific date or a more specific place, the hints will be better.

Diana (12m 24s):
That’s really great advice. And also be aware that if you have a really common name too, you could get a lot of hints that maybe aren’t correct. Especially I’ve seen this in my English ancestors in England. You have maybe a parish and you’ve got lots and lots of families with the same surname and several people have the same exact name and they’re in the same place. You have to be so careful to really review everything and try to make sure you’re matching hints to the correct person.

Nicole (12m 53s):
Yes. Should we talk about the homepage of Family Search, I forgot to mention that?

Diana (12m 58s):
Yeah, I think it’s really fun that Family Search keeps giving us some new options on the homepage. Right on the homepage there is a place that’s called recommended tasks and you can open it or close it, but right there you can select records and it will show you all sorts of different people that have record hints, the little blue boxes, and you could scan that and see who they have hints for. And I currently have so many hints because I haven’t looked at my people for awhile and I need to go work on some of these.

Nicole (13m 28s):
Yeah.

Diana (13m 28s):
kind of a fun, mindless thing to do sometimes

Nicole (13m 31s):
Not too mindless, pay attention.

Diana (13m 34s):
Sometimes it’s easy to figure out that it’s your person, especially if you’ve researched them a lot.

Nicole (13m 41s):
And I like that it shows you record hints for collateral lines as well, because often those are the ones that need a little work that we haven’t really spent too much time beefing up their record.

Diana (13m 51s):
Right. Absolutely. So it’s great that Family Search keeps giving us so much help. It’s like having a research assistant really giving us these hints. So let’s talk a little bit about how to evaluate a hint and you kind of touched on this, Nicole, when you talked about matching it up, but I’ll give an example of my case study of Wilford Royston. The reason this whole thing happened with this person was I got an email. I had been opted in to Family Search emails about hints, and I got a hint and it was a newly indexed record collection called Oklahoma School Records, 1895 to 1936.

Diana (14m 32s):
And I didn’t even know this was a thing that they had school records in Oklahoma. And I was so curious about this collection. So I clicked into the hint and I saw a record that the father of the family had listed all the children who were going to enroll in school and they’re complete for dates day, month, year, and their ages and whether they were male or female and their names, you know, I’m thinking, wow, this is a really, really great record. And this is especially good for Oklahoma because birth records really were not kept there reliably until after 1920, even though they were mandated in 1908 with statehood, people just didn’t do it.

Diana (15m 18s):
And so a lot of these Oklahoma families, I just used census records to try to put them together and to do a good estimation of their birth year and their names and such. And sometimes, you know, we can find them in later records of their life, but sometimes you can’t, sometimes they just get lost and you can’t figure out any more about them. So the first step, when you get a hint like this is to actually look at the image, if it’s an image and this one was, it was an indexed database, but it had images attached to it. And it showed this Wilford Royston in a list of the children of R E Royston. So the father didn’t give his full name. It was R.E. Royston of Anadarko, Oklahoma, and it had all these children and Wilford was listed as a girl.

Diana (16m 3s):
Well, that was a problem because when I compare that record to what I had put on Family Search, I had entered Wilford as a male. That leads me to the next step. You know, after you’ve looked at the image, tried to understand what this record is all about. Then you need to go look at all your other records for that individual. And I had attached on this individual’s page census records, and this is where the big problem came. We had a conflict in the census records, the 1920 census listed the child as Floyd W Royston as son, age four and two twelfths. And in 1930, there’s no Floyd. Instead, there was a Wilfred, daughter, age 14.

Diana (16m 46s):
So I don’t know, Nicole, what would you have thought? Would you thought Wilfred and Floyd was a girl or a boy? Boy. Well, that’s what I decided at. That’s all I had and I couldn’t find any more information on Wilfred. And so I just entered it as a boy. So that’s what I had done. And when I looked at the records, I realized, you know, that we had some conflicting information here. And so then I had to consider the informant and this is their third step when we’re, we’re reviewing these hints, I have to think about who’s giving the information and we know that census records can get messed up depending on the informant census taker, probably just the sight of, for himself, that Floyd had to be a male.

Diana (17m 31s):
You know, sometimes they can miss here or maybe they forgot to mark it and that the next house, they go back and think, oh, I forgot to mark. I think this was the male. We don’t know. But with the school record, I did know. It was great because I thought R. E. Royston gave the birth information and when I looked at the record, I realized that the father was Robert Edward Royston, and this makes sense. And the cool thing was on these cards at the very bottom there’s a little statement that says that the parent or guardian swore under oath, that the information was correct. Isn’t that awesome that you get to see that they actually really had to provide correct information.

Diana (18m 11s):
That was fun. So that collection had a few other years of enrollment for the family. So it appears that every year they were supposed to fill out these cards for enrolling the children in school. And when I compared every single time, Wilfred is a female. Everything, you know, all the birth dates, everything agrees from year to year to year. And so I of course, had to go make some changes on my database, as well as the Family Search family tree.

Nicole (18m 40s):
So if you only had those two census records and you had one as a boy, as an infant, and one is a girl as a teenager, I’m thinking it’s less obvious when it’s a little baby, if it’s a boy or girl, but when it’s a 14 year old, it’s a little more obvious.

Diana (18m 57s):
Except for the census taker maybe didn’t see the children. I don’t think they bring them out and parade them and say, well, this is this, you’re just, he was just writing this down or she’s just writing it down. Kind of fun to think back about how that happened with the census taking

Nicole (19m 13s):
It is. And it makes me wonder if the census taker asked for each person’s gender or if he just guessed. Yeah. What are the names of everyone in your family and then boy, or girl, boy, or girl, like, can you imagine that process of asking the gender for each person?

Diana (19m 28s):
That is really true. And that might be why some of them do get mixed up this isn’t the first case I’ve had where I kind of a nondescript name that could go either way the gender was wrong.

Nicole (19m 38s):
Yeah. Well that is an interesting case study that you had the gender wrong and that you had to fix it. And it’s so great that the Family Search hint still came up, even though you had the gender wrong.

Diana (19m 51s):
I know, I think that’s interesting. And it’s probably just because so many other things matched because I did have other children in the family and I can’t speak for the programmers, I don’t know how the hints work, but having complete information for the family, with names of the other children and the parents, maybe that just really helped me.

Nicole (20m 14s):
Yeah. It makes sense. You know, I wonder if that the algorithm kind of looks at in general, how much of the information matches. And so if just one little thing is off, then maybe it’s still, okay. That’s really good to think about and to consider checking those hints, especially for these record groups that we never would have thought of. It reminds me of another time when we’ve had a record hint for a marriage record, we were looking for, it was in Texas. And we had been looking in a different county because they lived in that county and we didn’t know that they went over to this other county and there are just so many counties in Texas. So we just had not expanded our search to that county yet. But then a record hint popped up one day and this was for our direct line ancestor that showed her marriage record.

Nicole (20m 56s):
So that was a fantastic record hint as well.

Diana (20m 60s):
Yeah, I remember that. And that was exciting. I mean, I’m excited when I get these hints, but then I’m thinking, dang, I spent hours doing that search and never found it, but that is the world that we’re living in with our genealogy and all these great things.

Nicole (21m 13s):
Well, sometimes after we do our research on Family Search and we attach the hints, we forget about it and we leave it there, but it really is a good idea to do some extra research and then keep your own database as well. So those hints can give us clues that lead us to more research avenues. And sometimes we have to do more research to even discover if that hint applies to our individual. So in this case, searching for Wilfred F Royston on Find a Grave was a chance to locate her, Find a Grave Memorial. So be sure to continue your research beyond just the hint and see if you can find a little bit more beyond that hint, and then record the information that you find in your own database because Family Search family tree is a collaborative tree and can be changed.

Nicole (22m 3s):
So it’s always good to keep your conclusions in a place where only you can modify them.

Diana (22m 9s):
Right. I like to tell everyone, you have to keep your own database somewhere. I was just looking at our Family Search family tree pedigree, and notice that there’s a whole different set of parents for our James B. Harris. I need to go explore that because I like I’ve got some good evidence for the other set of parents that used to be on there. But luckily I have in my own database, I have all the research that I’ve done. And then go see if this is maybe just a merging, you know, who knows? We need to go look at it, but yeah, always, always need to keep our own databases

Nicole (22m 48s):
Well that can be a DNA project for another time because when I was making your network graph of matches, I saw a lot of matches descending from the Harris side.

Diana (22m 57s):
Great. And Harris is obviously a very common name and our ancestor is John Harris, which is even more common. And so I think DNA is going to be a really, really good clue. And that will be really fun because that is a major hole in our pedigree chart. Well kind of to wrap up this episode, just another fun idea for those Family Search hints is when you’ve discovered maybe this new index database that you got a hint from consider who else might be in it. And in the case of these Oklahoma school records, I immediately thought of my dad. He was going to school in Oklahoma. So I did a search, looked at his page and they had had showed up on his page as well.

Diana (23m 37s):
It was really fun because my grandfather had filled out the information and he had all the names of the children and their birth dates. He had signed it, and it was just fun to see a record in his own handwriting and to see where they were living. They moved around so much during those depression years. And I had never even heard of the little township that he lists. And so that was kind of fun just to find an additional record for my dad. I didn’t know his birth date, but it was nice to see that his dad knew it too

Nicole (24m 6s):
Well. That’s so fun. And I love that picture of Grandpa Shults when he’s a little school boy with his whole class and he just has the cutest little face and it looks so much like my brother, I just love that picture from his school days.

Diana (24m 18s):
Yeah. And he left some really funny stories. And I think that’s the time when they had to get on a donkey to go to school every day and they hated it because he’d buck them off before he would let them ride it. And every day they’d have to get on and get bucked off and then they could finally ride him to school.

Nicole (24m 33s):
I remember him telling us that story. It was pretty funny.

Diana (24m 37s):
Great story. It’s from my dad. Yes.

Nicole (24m 40s):
Well, all right, everyone. Thanks for listening today. We hope you can go find some unexpected information on your Family Search Hints, and it will help you in your research.

Diana (24m 49s):
And don’t forget to evaluate them and analyze them well before you connect them. So good luck and you’re researching everyone this week. Bye-bye.

Nicole (24m 57s):
Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our Research Like a Pro online course or join our next Study Group. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com. To share your progress and ask questions join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our eCourse or Study Group. If you like what you heard and would like to support this podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.