RLP 113: Revisiting Objectives

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 113: Revisiting Objectives. 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 (40s):
Hi everyone, and welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer, and I’m here with my mother, accredited genealogist, Diana Elder. Hi Diana.

Diana (54s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you doing today?

Nicole (56s):
I’m doing well. How are you?

Diana (58s):
I am doing well, also. Went outside this morning and it was actually cool. I think the heat of the summer is breaking down a little bit. So I’m excited about that. It’s been a very hot, hot summer here. How about, well, it’s always a hot summer there.

Nicole (1m 15s):
Yeah. We’ve actually had some cooler weather this weekend, too. We were able to go out and go on some walks and hang out outside without being too burning hot in the sun. So it’s nice to have cooler weather.

Diana (1m 26s):
It is. Well, I have been working on getting my presentation ready for the UGA conference coming up in a couple of weeks. So that’s been fun. I always enjoy putting together a new presentation and this one’s all about migration, trails and roads and you know, all the various ways people got from one place to another. So it’s been really a fun presentation to do.

Nicole (1m 49s):
Yeah. And I know you’ve been busy with your DNA client report as well. How’s that coming?

Diana (1m 55s):
Good. I finished that all up over the weekend and I’m giving that to the client with lots of ideas for further research, because this is probably one of those that will just take several iterations of a research project to solve. It’s an adoption in the 1850s. And so there’s a lot more work to be done on the DNA, but I’m hoping that I have a really good solid foundation built for her so that she can go forward now and build on that and eventually fall of this question,

Nicole (2m 28s):
How great. So did the client do a lot of the initial documentary phase of research herself?

Diana (2m 34s):
Yes. Had done a lot of good research and when I get a case like that, I go through everything again with a fine tooth comb because I’m trained to look for details and have different questions in my mind when I look at the records. And so I did discover a few new things going through all of that research and then set up a really good basis for the DNA research, with an Airtable research log and some DNA clustering and working on Ancestry with the tools they are, and then, you know, the report outlines methodology and what to do going forward. So hopefully it will be a really good benefit.

Nicole (3m 16s):
That’s great that you set that all up for her to continue moving forward. That’ll be nice. Well, I’ve been working on my ProGen study group. We finished up our proof argument first draft, and everyone turned them in and now we are reviewing each other’s proof arguments and giving feedback. So it’s been interesting to read the proof arguments of my peers and to learn about their cases and kind of compare them to the standards and the rubrics from the Board for Certification of Genealogists. And just to review those requirements, you know, what you have to do to meet genealogical proof. And probably the hardest thing right now is during COVID there hasn’t been access to some of those courthouses and onsite research facilities that we would need to in order to get our reasonably exhaustive research done.

Nicole (4m 3s):
So that was challenging for a lot of us. Yeah.

Diana (4m 6s):
Yes. That is exactly what is happening right now with all of our research. And so we’re all having to put as limitations to our work, not having access to these repositories that we use really use. And it’s really good to put that in something that we had that limitation at this time, because otherwise someone reading that report or proof argument would say, well, why didn’t you just go check this resource, not knowing that we couldn’t go check that resource, good job getting your proof argument. And those are so much work.

Nicole (4m 37s):
Yeah, it was a lot of work, but I’m excited because now I have this conclusion that I already had made written up and it needs a lot of work for the next draft because I just ran out of time to polish it up. So I’m excited to go through it and finish it up

Diana (4m 53s):
Well on that kind of leads us into our topic for today because we are going to be talking about research reports and proof arguments, and a little bit about what is the difference. And the reason we’ll be including that in our discussion is because we are going to do our very first revisiting Research Like a Pro episode today. We were chatting last week, you know, and we decided that since so many people have joined us since we began this podcast, it would be helpful to go through all the steps again, in a little bit different fashion, adding things that we’ve learned through experience, working with so many other people in our study groups and in our own research.

Diana (5m 36s):
So kind of a fresh look at Research Like a Pro. So today we are doing Revisiting Objectives and we thought it would be fun for all of you listening to take you through the process using a case study. We use case studies a lot as we’re talking here because we know it just helps to illustrate what we’re trying to get across. And so we decided to do for this whole little series, the case study of our ancestor, Nancy Briscoe, who married Richard Frazier. And I actually did this case study during one of our 14 day mini challenges. And if you’re not familiar with that, we do that once or twice a year.

Diana (6m 18s):
I think this year we did it in January, February, about that timeframe. And we’ll probably do it again next year that same timeframe, but what it is is every day, we have a challenge that people who are joining us do 30 minutes a day of research. And that’s it. And of course, we always joke that by the end, you know, I usually am spending a little bit more than 30 minutes, but it’s amazing what you can do in just setting that time and going forward. So this whole project was an out shoot of that. So we’re going to be talking about revisiting objectives, timelines and analysis, locality research, revisiting research, planning, citations, and revisiting report writing.

Diana (7m 6s):
So we hope you will join us for the next several weeks as we go through all of these steps. And if you’ve been thinking about doing a complete Research Like a Pro project, maybe this would be really fun that we would talk about one of the steps and then you could go work on that for the next week. You could do your own little challenge or your own little project as we go through these different parts of the process.

Nicole (7m 31s):
Yes. I think it’s a good idea to pick an objective that you can just do a little bit on every day and make progress on one of your goals. Okay, let’s start with just talking about an objective and really defining it. So what is an objective when Diana and I were discussing this before the podcast, we kind of came up with this idea of an objective, being a little different from a research question. So in genealogy standards and in mastering genealogical proof, a research question is defined as a question that asks about identity, relationship events or situations.

Nicole (8m 13s):
And so a research question that answers one of those types of questions, and that is broad enough that you can actually find the answer to the question, but also focused enough that the question will yield an answer that can be checked against the genealogical proof standard to see if it meets that standard. And so typically the product of a research question that Tom Jones talks about in his book, Mastering Genealogical Proof, the product will be a proof argument and that can be checked against the, the GPS. And so that might be slightly different than what an objective is.

Nicole (8m 54s):
Tell us more about kind of the difference we’re making between a research question and an objective.

Diana (9m 2s):
Sure. So I was first introduced to objectives when I did my accreditation through, ICAPGEN, or the International Commission for the Accreditation of Professional Genealogists. And I was taught about objectives because that was key in our generation project. We had to have an objective for each generation, as well as an overarching objective. And then it’s also as part of the testing when you do a final project and you’re given four hours to do a complete research project. And this is really key in our client work, where we have to set a specific objective for however many hours the client has hired us for.

Diana (9m 45s):
And so with accreditation, it kind of is a mirror of client work, and you want to make sure that, you know, specifically what you are searching for. And so an objective is written out and placed at the beginning of your document on your computer screen, it’s something to keep you focused. And it’s very, very helpful when you’re just doing research on anything. So the culmination of an objective is generally a research report. It’s guiding you in a specific research project and you’ll end up with a research report. And then sometimes it takes several of those reports to actually come to genealogical proof where you could actually write a proof argument.

Nicole (10m 33s):
Perfect. Thank you. I really like this distinction between a research question that leads to a proof argument versus an objective that leads to a research report because often a research report will just be a certain phase of the research that we are trying to work on. Maybe a guiding question. That’s a supporting question to our overarching question. So a research report doesn’t always mean that we’ve finished or proven our question where it’s just kind of finishing up that phase of the research. In Mastering Genealogical Proof, Jones talks about how, if we have a question that is too broad, then it allows too many correct answers that can’t be tested by the Genealogical Proof Standard.

Nicole (11m 17s):
And then if our question is too narrow and too specific, you know, we want an exact date of something that might be unanswerable because the records of the place and the time that are available may not have that exact answer that we’re looking for. So he gives some really good guidance for how to make a good question that will lead to a proof argument. Some of the guidance that he gives you said in lectures and stuff that we should not have a yes or no question for our research question. However, with an objective, when we’re just trying to write a report for a certain phase of the research, we’ll often have a yes or no question. We just have to think of our broad question, our overarching question, maybe as who are the parents of so-and-so, but we’ll have multiple phases of research where we identify, you know, the vital events, if that person and each one of those can be its own research report with an objective.

Nicole (12m 7s):
And we might have a hypothesis for who the parents are. And we could say, are so-and-so the parents of this person. And that could be our objective for another phase of the research, which will result in a research report. And then after we gather all of this information and we finally settle on who the parents are, we can use what we’ve written in our reports to create a proof argument for who the parents are. So I think it’s really helpful to think about objectives as what goes along with a report and then a research question as what goes along with a proof argument. So hopefully that helps us kind of understand what we’re doing and in Research Like a Pro we’re really teaching you and talking about these reports and these small phases of research.

Nicole (12m 51s):
So when you make your objective, it’s okay to focus on a smaller supporting question that might lead to an overarching research question later. Like just maybe one biographical detail that you want to learn about, like the birth or the death of somebody. Breaking it down into these manageable phases with a specific objective for your research will really help you to make more progress, like we always talk about in Research Like a Pro, and it will help you to not get bogged down in your overarching question of something difficult to prove that’s going to require a lot of indirect evidence, can really help you make progress on finding out the things that you need to find.

Diana (13m 28s):
Right. I think so many times we have these really big ideas. We want to break through this brick wall, which is great. We always want to break down those brick walls and discover the parents of an ancestor, or we want to learn everything we can about an ancestor’s life and write a big book or a big history. And those are great, but those all have to start with something a little bit smaller. And that’s where those phases that become several different research reports. Each with a little different objective can really help us to get to that and the product.

Nicole (14m 6s):
Absolutely. And this is really important with DNA research, because if we try to do everything all at once the traditional research, the DNA analysis, we will quickly get bogged down. So with DNA research, it’s good to start off with doing a phase of documentary research, then a phase of looking at the DNA evidence and seeing what it points to. And then once you come up with some different hypothesis, you can test each of those by asking a yes or no objective question, and then either eliminating those hypotheses or finding out that that one was a yes. So breaking down your research when you’re doing a DNA project will be really helpful and having smaller objectives with reports attached when you are writing your objective, it’s important to include specific details about the person or research subject.

Nicole (14m 58s):
So you might want to include their vital information, their birth, death, marriage dates, and their spouse. But sometimes we get the question, what do you do if you don’t have any of those details, maybe you only have them listed on a census. It’s okay to estimate. So if you have them on a census, you have an estimate of their birth year and their place of birth. And you can also put their residence at a certain date. So you don’t need to like spell out that this census they were in so-and-so, you just say, and who resided in Belle county, Texas in 1880, something like that. And it just puts that person in a place in time. And that’s really helpful when you are first starting out reading someone else’s report or proof argument like I’ve been doing so that you can just right away get an idea of when and where they lived to helping differentiate them from all the other people with that same name in the world.

Nicole (15m 50s):
So those key identifiers are really, really important. What I usually do is just put in their birth, date and place; their spouse, marriage date and place; and then their death date and place. And if I don’t have some of those, I just leave it out.

Diana (16m 4s):
Right. And you can also estimate. Often we’ve got censuses, may not always agree, but they can guide us to an estimated date or place. And that can help. Also, we want to have something that’s written down that we can match all the records that we’re going to find against. And you may think, well, yeah, I’m going to remember when my person that I am researching was born or married and died. But you know, in the course of researching, your brain might get a little addled and you can’t remember those exact dates. So it’s very handy having it written, you know, we say, put it in the research log, the beginning of your report, put it everywhere. So you know what you are doing and you will keep from going off, down those paths of bright, shiny objects, because it’s not your objective.

Diana (16m 49s):
So let’s talk about some of these types of objectives. I have defined those in the book as identity, relationships, and ancestor actions, which kind of go right along with genealogy standards. Identity is of course key in genealogy. We’re always trying to figure out who this person is in the record. Is it our ancestor or is it another person of the same name? And that is where we run into so many problems. We see that on Ancestry family trees, we see it on the Family Search family tree where we’ve had people’s identities merged. And that’s a major, major problem with all of the online genealogy going on because, you know, it takes some time to differentiate people.

Diana (17m 35s):
So we might have an objective that really is trying to decide if the ancestor we have hypothesized is ours truly is ours, especially if they’re maybe other people with the same name in the same county. So that might be a good identity question, a relationship question, you know, that can be often extending the pedigree who are the parents, or often we may want to do descendancy because we are trying to figure out some DNA matches. And our DNA matches are descendants of a common ancestor. We may have a whole project where we’re really working out the descendants of an ancestor. So we could use that with our DNA and we may have an established ancestry.

Diana (18m 22s):
Maybe it’s out of a biographical book, maybe it’s Family Search. You know, we see several generational links of a family going back, maybe for a span of a hundred or 200 years, whatever. We may be picking out one of those links and just wanting to verify it, you know, is this father really correct for this individual? And so even if it’s a known relationship, we may want to be verifying it. That’s actually a really good objective to do when we get back in time. And we haven’t done the research to verify, and then finally discovering ancestor actions. You know, once we have discovered relationships and we know more about our people, often we wanted to dig in and find out did they serve in the military?

Diana (19m 8s):
What was that like for them? Or what was their occupation, what was the like to be a farmer in Texas in the 1850s? What was their migration pattern? What would that have been like? How would they have come to the west from the east? So many interesting things that can add to the stories of our ancestors and that will speak to everyone differently. I’ve done entire projects for clients on just discovering the military actions of their ancestors. Those are really neat projects. I love those. So that is what we’re going to be using for our case study actually, because Nancy Briscoe, she is my second great grandmother, always have to check my pedigree chart, thankfully it’s on my wall, and Nancy Briscoe, she had a long life.

Diana (20m 1s):
So she was born, I’ll read you my objective so you know a little bit more about her. “The objective for this project is to discover more about the life of Nancy Briscoe born seven, February, 1847 in Benton county, Arkansas. Nancy, married Richard Frazier about 1865 in Missouri and died 30 January, 1924 in Love County, Oklahoma.” So you’ll notice the migration from Arkansas, Missouri, and then to Oklahoma, while not mentioned in there is that she also spent some time in Texas and she lived from 1847 to 1924. So she lived a really good long life. I have pictures of Nancy with my grandmother as a little girl.

Diana (20m 44s):
So I have a kind of a cool connection with her, but quite honestly in my genealogy, I just pretty much had dates and places and censuses. Did not have anything to fill in all those years. She did not leave a personal history, nobody wrote anything about her. And if you were listening to those dates, you’ll realize she would have been smack dab in the middle of the Civil War as a young woman. I was really thinking I wanted to learn more about what was happening. So you’ll see that my objective was pretty broad. I’m going to talk a little bit later in the episode about how sometimes after we’ve set an objective, we might want to go back and change it a little bit.

Nicole (21m 30s):
Absolutely. Yeah. Especially after we review what we know and we can kind of understand where we’re at and what more, further questions we have to help tweak and narrow down our objective a little bit. So before we go forward, I wanted to just respond to your discussion of the types of objectives. So identity, relationship, and ancestor actions earlier, when I was talking about genealogy standards, they say that your research question could be about identity, relationship, situations and events. And I was trying to think of a research question that has to do with the situation. And I just thought of the article that we recently read in National Genealogical Society, Quarterly, that publication, it was an article about land, it’s by Karen Mauer Green and Birdie Birdie Holsclaw and it was from the NGSQ of June, 2012.

Nicole (22m 24s):
And it was titled, Beginning at a Black Oak, Hockenbarger Evidence from a Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Neighborhood Reconstruction. And the situation that this article was focusing on was the fact that George Hockenbarger had acquired land from his father-in-law Nicholas Hollander. And so the whole article goes through to prove that that situation did happen because that situation when proven proves that a relationship is accurate as well. So I thought that was a pretty good example of a proof argument that rests on a question of a situation. But typically I think what our research focuses on is relationship and identity.

Nicole (23m 9s):
And often those ancestor actions that we will do a project on are key for proving a relationship or proving an identity, because we will need all the sources that we can to differentiate two people of the same name. I talked about this in our original series at the beginning episodes episodes two through eight or whatever it was, when I talked about my Moses Isenhour project and how there were two men of the same name, Moses Isenhour, in Texas, who had both been in the Civil War and looking at their military records and their death records, I was able to separate them into two people. So I think sometimes we want to research the actions of our ancestors because they are interesting and we want to know the stories, but oftentimes they will be really key to us being able to prove identity and relationship as well.

Nicole (23m 59s):
So they really can go hand in hand with some of those other objectives.

Diana (24m 3s):
I think that’s a great example of how they really work together. Sometimes they want to really separate things out, but in genealogy, I think it’s really difficult to do that because an identity is made up of your relationships and what you do your actions, right? So it’s nice to kind of have these guiding principles, but then we also have to realize that it all works together.

Nicole (24m 27s):
Yeah. So going back to your objective for the Nancy Briscoe project, I was just going to point out all the great identifiers that you included. So to make sure that we know that this is the right Nancy Briscoe, we have a birth date for her. So you put in the full birth date, seven, February, 1847 and the county and state of birth, Benton county, Arkansas. And then of course we have our spouse, Richard Frazier. And now that we have her spouse, we really identified her, you know, because how many people named Nancy Briscoe married someone named Richard Frazier, probably zero. Once, you know, the spouse that really identifies the person, doesn’t it?

Diana (25m 7s):
Yeah, it does.

Nicole (25m 8s):
And then we also have a marriage year and state and then a death and a place of death too. So this is a great objective with unique identifiers.

Diana (25m 18s):
Yeah, and even though I know a lot about Nancy Briscoe, having that written out is very helpful because there’s a lot of details there. A lot of places, a lot of dates and I for sure would not remember that as I was trying to look at censuses and see how they lined up. So it really is helpful to have that objective stated clearly and upfront.

Nicole (25m 41s):
Now let’s talk about the steps for creating your own research objective. So if you decide to go forward this week and make an objective for a project first, you’ll want to analyze your pedigree and choose a question. You might have a person in your family tree whose connection to their parents seems a little dubious, maybe hasn’t been proven, maybe it’s just a guess, and you’re not sure. Maybe you have a person in your family tree who’s missing vital information and you’re not really sure when they were born or when they were married or died. Maybe you’re missing some extra children. It could be that you haven’t looked at all the sources that are relevant to that person, whatever it is, you can go ahead and choose a question that you’d like to answer and then formulate your objective.

Nicole (26m 27s):
It might be nice to just brainstorm all the different questions that you have and then choose one that might be the appropriate question to start with. Oftentimes we suggest moving backward from what you know, to more distant times. So if you have an ancestor that you know their death date and that kind of thing, maybe you’ll want to move back toward researching their early life as a child and trying to discover their parents after you’ve done that. So after you formulate your objective, then write it down somewhere at the top of your research project document or your notes or your research log, whatever you’re going to use.

Nicole (27m 9s):
And we suggest using a document that we call the research project document. And at the top of that, it’s a space for your objective. And then after that, you can include some more details about your research plan and your notes from your research,

Diana (27m 23s):
Right. Those are all great steps. And I love the idea of doing a brainstorming session so that you get a lot of different ideas about what you might want to do your research project for. We do that in the Study Group, we ask people to come up with a bunch of different ideas, and then we give some feedback on what would work well. So yeah, think of all those things that you’d like to know, what would be fun to do a project on. Now, I mentioned earlier that I sometimes have to tweak my objective and this can happen because after step two, when we analyze the records, we go back through everything we’ve already found. Sometimes we find the answer to our research objective right there on the records we already found and so then we need to broaden our objective or change it all together.

Diana (28m 8s):
But sometimes we find that our research objective was way too broad, just like Nicole, your example with the Civil War men, where you wanted to research three men, and it was a little bit overwhelming and broad. So, you know, we sometimes are a little overzealous and we think we want to do this huge project. But the thing to keep in mind is if you do this huge project, when we come to writing the research report that can lend to kind of an overwhelming research report. So I always recommend if you’re just new to this process, you’ve never really written up your research, start with something a little bit more narrow so that you can finish up and actually go all the way through it with a written report at the end.

Diana (28m 54s):
So when I did some of the analysis of my Nancy Briscoe, I decided that what I really wanted to learn more about was her early life, all the way up to the Civil War and just past Reconstruction basically before she moved to Texas with her family in the 1870s. So I changed my objective a little bit to say, “The objective for this project is to discover more about the Civil War era of the life of Nancy Briscoe,” and then I included the same key identifiers of birth marriage and death. And that helped me to just narrow it down a bit. You know, obviously we have the Texas era and then they moved into Indian Territory and then the era after Oklahoma statehood.

Diana (29m 39s):
So there were a lot of different facets of her life. And I didn’t want to have that all be one huge research project. I wanted to focus from basically her birth in 1847 to about 1865, maybe 1870, you know, that era. So I worked through, and I’ll talk about this later, I worked through the initial analysis and research planning and came up with this hypothesis, which we’ll talk about later, but I’ll just give you a little preview here, my hypothesis for the project was Nancy Briscoe experienced the Civil War as a young woman growing up on the border of Arkansas and Missouri.

Diana (30m 20s):
The devastation of war precipitated the move of Nancy and her Confederate veteran husband, Richard Frazier to Texas by 1870 and shaped the remainder of her life.” So I’ve got an objective and then I will be working on that hypothesis. So you have a little preview of maybe what we’ll be discovering about Nancy as we go through these episodes.

Nicole (30m 43s):
Great. Yeah. I can already tell that what your research plan will include is a lot of historical context and background information about what it was like in Arkansas, and Missouri during the Civil War. So that’ll be great.

Diana (30m 57s):
Yes. And it is amazing what we can learn about our ancestors from putting them into the context of where they were living. That adds so much to their story. And often we can discover more records about them when we do that. .

Nicole (31m 12s):
Definitely. All right, everyone, we hope that you learned something new about research objectives and research questions today, as we revisited this topic. So if you want to learn more about objectives, go back and listen to episode two. I believe where we first talk about it. And we have some articles that we’ll put in the show notes about objectives as well. And just remember that your objective will we view to be writing a research report and after writing several reports, hopefully you’re ready to write a proof argument about your ancestor, about some aspect of their identity, your relationship or situation. All right, good luck to you.

Diana (31m 50s):
All right, everyone. Talk to you later. Bye-bye

Nicole (31m 55s):
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.