RLP 114: Revisiting Timelines and Analysis

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 114: Revisiting Timelines and Analysis. 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 (42s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone. Welcome to the show, I’m Nicole Dyer and I’m here with my mother, Diana Elder. Hi, Diana, how are you?

Diana (54s):
Hi, Nicole. I am doing well today.

Nicole (58s):
And what have you been working on?

Diana (59s):
Well, I am starting a brand new project for the month of September, and that’s always fun to start a new project. This one is located in Ohio, which I’ve done lots of work in Ohio. It’s a little different than my usual Southern cases, and it’s fun to go to a new locality in research. I really enjoy that. And this is a common challenge. This is trying to figure out the parents of a woman who was born in the early 1800s, and we just have a maiden name for her from a child’s death certificate. And so I’m going to be really working on looking for all the families of that surname in and around the counties that she was living and seeing if I can try to make some connections.

Diana (1m 45s):
So we’ll be doing a lot of FAN club research, and I think I will be using the Airtable research log with the FAN club added in. So I’m excited to try that new technology in this project.

Nicole (1m 60s):
Oh, great. Well, I’ve been working on getting ready for the DNA Study Group, which is starting right now. And I did a little poll of people in the study group about how many DNA kits or test takers they have that they’re using the results for. And most of them said that they are using more than one person’s test results for their objective. So I needed to create a new Airtable DNA research log base that I could share with everybody as a template for them to use that has a separate table just for the test takers. And what I did is make it possible for you to list out the different test takers whose kits you manage, and then where they tested, where you’ve transferred their results to and their contact information.

Nicole (2m 46s):
And then that meant that I had to create a little bit of a different setup also for the DNA cousins who match your test takers and then their contact info, and then another table for the match details, which is just a row telling who of your testers matches, which of the DNA cousins, the number of centimorgans and the match page. So it simplifies the data entry and it’s just going to be a little bit smoother and it will really help people to keep track of matches for different kids. So I’m excited about it.

Diana (3m 18s):
I think that sounds wonderful. I think all of us are getting to that point where we have multiple test takers. And so we really need some tools to manage that. I know I get comments all the time on our Facebook group or emails where people are just so overwhelmed with their DNA. And so these tools to organize and keep track of the data are so valuable. Thank you for adding that and figuring that all out. And now I have to go learn how to use those new tables, my project for the week, I guess,

Nicole (3m 51s):
Hopefully it’s pretty intuitive because I put in some examples there. And one of my examples is you, so you’re listed there as the test taker, but I just put in pretend information for the rest of it. All right, so I’m going to put a link to that in the show notes, since we did talk about it today, in case anybody listening wants to go try out that new Airtable base for multiple DNA testers. Okay, well, today’s subject is Revisiting Timelines and Analysis. So as you know, from last week, we are going back through the Research Like a Pro process. Again, like we did an episodes two through nine or whatever it was, and we’re just talking about the process again with different examples and with more information from our experience in last year or two, this topic is kind of the stage where you gather everything that you know about your project or your objective that, you know, you’ve already found in the past.

Nicole (4m 48s):
And you just review everything that you have and gathering all the known information, then organizing it into a timeline or a chronology, and then really analyzing each of your pieces of information to understand the source, the information and the evidence to see what level of quality your information is. Right.

Diana (5m 7s):
I love this process and I love this step in the process is so fun to get out all your records and go through them again and look at them with a new eye. I just find that with every little bit of experience and education I get I learn more about the records and I see more in the records. And I think this is what is the real value of having someone else look at your research, or when a client gives me a project and often they’ve been working on this brick wall of theirs for years and years, but when I go through it and I do the timeline analysis, I just find so much more there than they ever dreamed. And that’s just because the more experience.

Diana (5m 47s):
So as genealogists, the more we learn, the more experience we have, we look at our things with a really fresh outlook. And that’s the value of doing this, this timeline analysis. You can do a chronology or a timeline. And so I’m just want to talk a little bit to the differences there. A timeline is done in a spreadsheet and you have a column for the date, the place, the source citation, and then concrete of the parts of evidence analysis, the information evidence, the source, any notes that you have, imagine a spreadsheet, and it’s all right there in front of you and you can color code it.

Diana (6m 28s):
You can do whatever you want to really show the information. So it’s pretty succinct. And I like that because I want to see everything kind of at a glance, but another way you can do this analysis is in a chronology. And that would be something that you do in a Google doc or a Microsoft word document. And you would just list the date and then you would go into more detail. Think of it more as a narrative form, where you would discuss that source in detail and the information and the evidence. It holds. Some people really like having some real description of each piece that you want to have in your chronology.

Diana (7m 10s):
So it just really depends. And if you’re just new to the process, you could try both and see the difference. See if you like one over the other and just kind of explore what works best for you and your research.

Nicole (7m 24s):
I really like the chronology. And I find that it’s helpful to write out a lot of analysis on some of my more difficult cases. So that one is really helpful for me. And actually sometimes I’ll make both, I’ll put a simple timeline up so I can kind of see visually the look of the timeline and the flow of it. And then I’ll write out all the details and all my thoughts and analysis in a longer chronology. And so I’ve done that before, and that can be helpful. You know, if it’s something that you’re really planning on doing a lot of work on, it’s helpful to do a very thorough starting point analysis like that.

Diana (8m 1s):
Another thought is that if you are writing that narrative about each of the sources, you could take portions of that to use for your research report, where you’re discussing that source. So it’s like giving a little bit of preliminary writing as you go. And a lot of people like that idea of writing as you’re going through this process. So that’s something that you could also try, you know, thinking that you maybe could use this in your future research report.

Nicole (8m 29s):
Yes. One thing that I just thought of that a lot of people who are new to Research Like a Pro wonder is should they make source citations for everything in their timeline? Yes, you should. But if you haven’t ever done source citations and you’re just making your timeline, and this is kind of your first step, you can wait until you get to the source citations step to practice and learn how to do that. And then the assignment we have you do is go back to your timeline and put in all the citations. So what you to do in your timeline is make sure you put a link to where that source is located online, or just describe where it is in your file folder so that you can easily get it again when you make the citation. Obviously it’s best to do the citation, if you know how, right when you’re doing your timeline, but if you don’t know how yet, then you’ll come back to that later.

Diana (9m 15s):
Right. And I put source citations a little bit later in the process because I wanted people just to have fun with this. And I thought, oh man, if we put source citations right away, that might scare off a lot of people, right? but if you’ve already done a lot of the process and then you come to that, you’re invested in it and then you’ll be able to kind of embrace the source citation. So there’s a lot of different order you can teach this process, but you have to just do one thing at a time.

Nicole (9m 43s):
All right, let’s talk about why we’re doing a timeline or chronology. So the purpose behind doing this step is to review everything that’s known about your research subject and gather everything that’s already been done about them. So you’re going to look in your home sources, your family tree that you’ve created, and you can also look at other people’s published online family trees, or other published sources that you know about. Like if you know that your aunt has a book about this side of the family, you’re going to want to check, that if you can, when you do this phase of gathering, what’s already known. This can become a little tricky though, as you start gathering what’s already known because you might be tempted to start doing actual research about unknown information and trying to find people who’ve found out stuff.

Nicole (10m 27s):
And that can just go into your research plan. But if you already know that your aunt has that book, you can try to get it and put it in your timeline now. So don’t go overboard here. You want to gather, what’s already known that’s, you know, within your access now and whatever you can’t access now, or you have ideas to research, that’s going to go into your research plan. So I like to check Ancestry published trees to see what other people have found and Family Search tree. And sometimes I will integrate some of their conclusions or the sources they have attached to that person as well, if it seems to be correct. And then I’ll just analyze that as an authored source in my timeline,

Diana (11m 7s):
I think those are great ideas. And I really liked what you said about being careful not to start researching and going down those rabbit holes, but just to put in your notes that this is something that could be future research could go into the research plan when you get to that step. So we get a lot of questions about this idea of a timeline from people. And one of them is if we could just generate a timeline from Ancestry or Family Search or from your personal genealogical software. And you know, our answer really is no, because the whole purpose of this is to help you to understand your information better.

Diana (11m 51s):
If you’re just using a timeline generated by software, it doesn’t make you look at it any differently, really. So in this process of actually looking at your things again, and then analyzing the sources in theme and the information you create a solid foundation for what you know, and you get a lot of ideas about where you can go further with this. If you haven’t looked at this research much or lately, you will have likely forgotten all those little nuances that are going to help you in making a research plan. So you really want to do this yourself.

Nicole (12m 30s):
I agree. I think it’s really helpful. All right, let’s talk about where to create your timeline or chronology. So if you’re doing a chronology, you’re just going to create it in a document word, Google docs, whatever you’re comfortable with, but for the timeline we suggest using a spreadsheet because it really allows you to sort your data and have more control over it. Obviously you could also create a table within a document, but I’ve found that those are a little bit clunkier and just have a little less options for sorting and for formatting. So we really prefer using a spreadsheet like Excel or Google sheets to create your timeline. And of course we love Airtable now as well.

Nicole (13m 12s):
And Airtable is a great option for creating your timeline too. Especially if it’s a DNA project and you’re creating a timeline for your research subject or hypothesized ancestor, and then you’re going to be doing DNA matches with it. Then it makes sense to just put everything all into one Airtable base.

Diana (13m 31s):
Right. I had gotten so I really like to have everything together in that one Airtable base. It works perfectly to keep it all in one place and it eliminates multiple files. Well, let’s talk about how much you should include in the timeline. This is another common question, because when you’re doing this process, you will have defined an objective. And sometimes people want to know if they should just put in the information that goes with that objective. And my thought is always, you want to include everything you can about the person, because how are you to judge whether that piece of information won’t work with your objective.

Diana (14m 11s):
I mean, we find answers to relationships in land records and if we had excluded putting in some of those different types of records into our timeline, we might have missed pieces of information that are really going to help us. So you really want to include everything that pertains to your research subject and their life. We have this phrase in the genealogy world of reasonably exhaustive research, where we want to examine all possibly relevant sources. So even if there is a source that was created after a person passed away, it was a source for one of their children’s records, but it pertains to ancestor that could be relevant to the person’s birth.

Diana (14m 56s):
And I think of the example of a woman, and you’re trying to figure out her maiden name and it’s found only in the death certificates of her children. Well, would that go in her timeline? Of course, that would, because that is going to provide evidence for her maiden name. And just because it was created after the time span of her life doesn’t mean we would not include it. So don’t limit yourself in this really think of everything that could help think a little bit outside the box. What else could there be out there that could give you information about your ancestor? Like I said, children’s death certificates or a pension application that was done by the widow or perhaps children think about what you’ve got for this family that could help with identifying and learning more about your research subject.

Nicole (15m 52s):
Yes. I think sometimes we want to just build a timeline based on the person’s early life and hope that that’ll be enough because if we go forward to the end of their life and their children, that adds a lot of data, but then that might give us a valuable clue that we would have missed before. So the more that you can do the better, especially if you have already gathered a lot of information about this family. All right, let’s talk about color coding the timeline. This is something that a lot of people find really useful, and Diana has color coded her example timeline of Nancy Briscoe. So some reasons why you might want to color code the events in your timeline are so you can quickly identify what you’re looking at, this is kind of a visual cue that, oh yeah, this green event is a residence and all of these green ones, these are places where they’ve lived, these are census residences.

Nicole (16m 44s):
And then pink, that’s a marriage. Okay. So I can see the marriage really quickly. And then the birth is color coded yellow. So I have several different conflicting dates that were given by various sources for her birth. So I’ve color coded all those yellow. So I can just remember that all those events in the beginning are all pieces of information about her birth. So the color coding can be really useful and fun.

Diana (17m 8s):
I like color. And I always say, if you can use color, why not use it? It’s easy to do. And it’s so fun. It just adds a little bit of interest to our eyes rather than a white screen all the time. So let’s talk about what you actually do with this timeline analysis. And that is when we look at the source information and evidence. So let’s talk about the source first and sources come in three types. We have original sources, derivative sources and authored sources. So there’s the column in the timeline. And if you’re doing a chronology, you would just add this for the source. So we first look at that and really think about when this source was created.

Diana (17m 55s):
And if this was the first time that information was recorded now in my Nancy Frazier analysis and her timeline, Nancy Briscoe Frazier, like Nicole said, I have several entries for her birth as written in the census records. And I’m sure a lot of you listening can relate to this, that there are so many different entries for her birth. He or she was born either in 1845, 1847, 48, 1850, 1849. You know, I’ve got a range there of about five years. And so when I look at all that information, I want to think about how that information can be used in researching her life.

Diana (18m 48s):
So a census record is an original record. It’s the first time information was recorded. So when the census taker came to the household in 1850 and asked, who was living in your household and how old are they and then recorded that. And then we are looking at the image of it, that is generally an original source. Sometimes in the census records, you can see that they were perhaps recopied for a state copy, or there’s something different with that. But you take a look at that and see if you can see that they handwriting is the same enumerator and that it looks like that the households were recorded in the order they were visited.

Diana (19m 30s):
We just have to look carefully at our sources. So another example in the timeline is Nancy Frazier’s application for a pension. Her husband had died. And in Oklahoma, when they passed the pension law in 1915, she applied for a Confederate pension because of his service in the Confederacy and that application has been digitized. It’s in beautiful color on the Oklahoma website. And it is an image of the original application. And you can see the different handwriting of the different clerks helping to fill out the information and she was providing the information.

Diana (20m 15s):
And so that’s an original record that was created at the time she applied for that pension. And then we also have on her record, a headstone photograph, and this is on Find A Grave that headstone was likely created at the time of her death, by her children. Sometimes headstones are created much later, but it is an original source. And we would have to look at the information and analyze it. But a photograph of a headstone is original. Then we have derivative sources which are copies or reproductions of the original. So on Find A Grave we also have memorials.

Diana (20m 60s):
Memorials can be derivative, or they can be authored. They can be a mix and Find A Grave is a good example of that. If someone is just simply copying off of that headstone, the dates and the names and whatever information there, that would be a derivative because they’re making a copy of the original headstone and putting that on, Find A Grave as a record. Sometimes those memorials are authored, however, because the person creating those is using other information. And I see this a lot where the information that someone has put on the Memorial is different from the headstone. So I always wonder, okay, well, where did that information come from?

Diana (21m 42s):
Did you get that from a death certificate, which differs from the headstone and we don’t always know why someone would have different dates that are on the headstone. So we just look at it carefully and analyze it, trying to decide what could be the most correct. Now, besides derivative, we have the authored source and this is where we have a mix of the original and derivative, it is authored by someone. We may know who that is, or we may not know. And an example of this would be a county history. In a county history we often have the author reporting on maybe early settlers or perhaps someone sent in a biography of their family to be included in that county history.

Diana (22m 35s):
And we could have some derivative sources where the author is maybe gone out and gotten some cemetery headstones and transcribe those and put those into the county history. It can be a huge hodgepodge of different facts, so it can have a good mix of original and derivative and we call that authored. Another good example of authored sources are family trees where people have taken a mix of all different kinds of records and created this new source, this family tree that has a mix of different types of sources.

Nicole (23m 15s):
Great. So as you review, the three types of sources are original, derivative, and authored. An original source is the first time information is recorded. A derivative is a copy or a reproduction, translation, or transcription of that original, and then authored is a mix of the two. Okay. Now let’s go on to information. The information item that you are specifically looking at, and there might be several within a source. And usually there are, and you can’t figure out what type of information it is until you’ve determined who the informant for that information was. The informant is just the person giving the information to the person, recording it.

Nicole (23m 56s):
If it’s primary information, then that information was given from a witness to the event. It’s a firsthand account. So in Diana’s timeline for Nancy Briscoe, an example of primary information is when Nancy gave information about her marriage on her pension application. She was present at that marriage and she remembers it, so she is a primary informant. Now she didn’t actually remember the date of her marriage, she just put the month and the year, right?

Diana (24m 27s):
Right. She put October, 1863.

Nicole (24m 28s):
So even though she didn’t remember the exact day, or, you know, maybe she just didn’t put the exact day, we don’t know, she’s still a primary informant because she was there at that marriage. And so we can also analyze the informant’s reliability and their memory at the time they’re giving the information, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was primary information. Another example of primary information is in Diana’s timeline for Nancy’s death date. So in the pension file that Oklahoma has for Nancy Brisco Frazier, that file contains a letter written by her son, Ed Frazier, which had Nancy’s death date and he was telling the pension board, she died on this date.

Nicole (25m 12s):
So that’s primary information because he was a witness to when she died, because he was there with her. Now, obviously the difference between firsthand accounts and people who are not witnesses is that they heard it from someone else. And so that makes the information secondary. So in the timeline, the example of Nancy’s birth date from the pension application, that is secondary information because even though she was present at her birth, she was not a reliable witness to her birth because she was an infant. So that was told to her, you were born on such and such date. And that was something that she was told and then she shared as secondary information on her pension application.

Nicole (25m 58s):
Another piece of secondary information from the timeline is when Nancy reported her husband’s military service. So I did think about this a little bit, because she might have been a witness to his service if she knew him at the time he went into the military and she saw him with his unit, maybe she could have been a witness to it, or maybe they got married afterward and she didn’t know him at all like she had never met him until after and he told her about his military service and therefore she was not a witness to it. And she just heard it from him. So what do you think Diana?

Diana (26m 34s):
I was thinking that it was secondary, but as I did more research on her, you know, they got married in 1863 smack dab in the middle of the Civil War and her husband, Richard Frazier joined Captain Clinton’s company, which was organized right there in the area they were living. So I have a feeling that she knew very well all about the company that he joined because her mother was a Clinton and I’m guessing this was probably an uncle or a relative. So she very well could have been a firsthand witness of his service

Nicole (27m 10s):
Um hmm, and I think she gave really specific information all about which company and everything, right?

Diana (27m 18s):
Yeah. She did. She talked about how first he was in infantry and then he was in the cavalry and he was in Marmaduke’s division. So there is specific information there, which makes me think she was probably more of a firsthand witness to that than we might’ve thought. Now contrast that with my other great-grandmother, Isabel Royston, and her husband served in the Confederacy in Alabama and she was in Missouri. And so they didn’t get married until they were both in Texas. So she would not have been firsthand. She would have definitely been a secondary informant on her pension just because he told her that he was serving in Alabama.

Diana (28m 1s):
So I think those are two good examples of different scenarios

Nicole (28m 4s):
For sure. And if I remember, right, Isabel didn’t know anything about Robert’s company at all. She just said he was a sharpshooter.

Diana (28m 13s):
Exactly.

Nicole (28m 14s):
Yeah. So sometimes you can look at the information that’s being given and that can help you determine whether or not it was probably primary or secondary if you’re not sure, but sometimes we don’t know. And that brings me to the final category of information, which is undetermined. You can’t tell who the informant was for sure. Or you can’t tell if the informant was an eye witness to the event, but you can always make an educated guess. Like I was saying, if you look at the information and compare and contrast it and correlate it with the other information that you have and try to figure out how accurate it was and make an educated guess. So for all the census information, except for 1940, we don’t know who the informant was for the family information names and birth dates and things.

Nicole (28m 57s):
So we just have to kind of guess usually the informant was supposed to be the head of the household, but the enumerator was able to ask someone else if the head of household was not available. So sometimes you can kind of figure it out. Maybe if all the information seems a little off, then maybe it was a farm hand giving me information who didn’t know or something like that. So on the census, all that information is undetermined except for the residence, which is primary information because the enumerator came to their house and witnessed where the family lived at that point in time. So the fact that they lived in 1850 in a certain location is primary information.

Nicole (29m 40s):
Another example of undetermined information is a headstone. So the headstone itself, if you have an image of it or you see it in person, is an original source, but the information on it usually doesn’t say who gave that information. It doesn’t say this headstone was created by so-and-so. Although sometimes it does, which is so nice when it says erected by so-and-so, but even if it was paid for and created by one of the children, it doesn’t mean that child was the one who was saying the birth and death date. Probably was, but you still don’t know for sure. The birth is probably almost certainly going to be secondary because if a person lived to an old age, the people who are still around making the headstone, probably weren’t an eye witness to their birth, unless they are older than the person who died.

Nicole (30m 27s):
For the death date that one could be primary, but we don’t know. So it’s still undetermined, but the person who created the headstone maybe was a witness to the person’s death. And so it could be primary.

Diana (30m 40s):
Okay. So I have a really good example from my latest project that I did. So, you know, those histories or biographies or genealogies that have been written like sometimes a really long ago, and you have no idea how accurate the information is. Well, I had one of those that told all about this family, and I thought, I’m just going to go look at the beginning and see if I can figure out how reliable all this information is, because this was obviously an authored source. You know, those genealogies they’ve gathered up sources, right? So I looked at the beginning, this was digitized on Ancestry and it was written in 1885, that’s when it was published. And then it had this note about the author and it talked about how he had scoured libraries and records and various repositories, and he had talked to all sorts of different family members to get the information.

Diana (31m 32s):
And then he named the specific person who gave the information for the family I was researching. And it turned out that he was an older brother of the research subject, and he would have known him from really well. So it was so fun because I was actually able to figure out an informant and to figure out that most of the information was primary information out of that Genealogy.

Nicole (31m 56s):
Oh, wonderful.

Diana (31m 56s):
But you know, you had to scroll to the beginning and then really read all that front matter. So if you have a family history, it’s really worth doing some exploration, which is why we want to do this analysis on our sources.

Nicole (32m 8s):
Yes. And that is a really good point that to do source analysis, we really have to understand the source and try to figure out who created it sometimes, especially with books, that means like looking through the whole book,

Diana (32m 25s):
It does, it does. And even with microfilm, a lot of times I will have a collection of, let’s say marriage records. And sometimes you have to scroll right to the beginning of the microfilm or the digitized microfilm that we usually use now. And sometimes there’ll be some there. We really have to do some good detective work on our sources to understand the information in them. It all goes together.

Nicole (32m 51s):
Yeah. And sometimes on like microfilms or books of church records at the beginning, it will tell you the name of the person who was recording it and their system, you know, the pastor or whatever would do the burial ceremony and then record it. Then you can kind of see, oh yeah, this is a firsthand account because he was there at the burial.

Diana (33m 12s):
Exactly. I think one of my most interesting cases involves a book where a woman, it literally said at the beginning of the book that this woman looked out her window every day and wrote down all the happenings in the little neighborhood, which just totally cracked me up. And then she had a scrapbook of all the newspaper clippings. And so, so that was the source, this book of this woman recording things that were happening and then the newspaper clippings to back those up. So that’s the fun about genealogy. We never know what we’re going to find.

Nicole (33m 46s):
That’s great.

Diana (33m 46s):
All right. So we’ve talked about the three kinds of information, primary, secondary, and undetermined, depending on who was the informant. Now we’re going to talk about the three kinds of evidence we have direct, indirect and negative evidence. And evidence is all about the research question or the question that is answered by the information. So in direct evidence, the information answers the question directly. So we have the question for my Nancy Briscoe. When was she married? Well, we have direct evidence in that widow’s pension application because it has the question, ‘When were you married?’ and she records there that it was October of 1863.

Diana (34m 39s):
Doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s accurate. It’s just directly answering the research question. It doesn’t have to be complete information to be direct evidence. Nancy obviously didn’t quite remember the day she was married, but she remembered October. Well, that could give me a clue that maybe she just kind of remembered it was in the fall, you know, that portion of the year. And so if I were later to find conflicting evidence that said maybe November or September, I could correlate and resolve that by saying she didn’t have a specific date and maybe she was just remembering the time of year because she was, you know, much older at the time she was giving that information.

Diana (35m 20s):
But it directly stated the answer to when she got married. Now indirect evidence is where the information provides a clue that we have to combine with other facts. So for that same question of when was Nancy married, we could turn to the census to get some clues. And often we have to do this when we do not have anything for a marriage record. We often look for when the first child was born and then we subtract a year. So with Nancy’s case, we have her in the 1870 census, the first census where she is married to her husband, Richard and their first child was born in 1868 as recorded on that census.

Diana (36m 5s):
So I have her in 1860 single, so we would think if we didn’t have a marriage date, that she could have been between 1860 and 1868 and often, you know, I’ll do an estimation of something like 1867 because the child was born in 1868, but it is indirect evidence because that question was not asked in the census, like when did you get married, it just asks, how old is this child? And so I’m having to do some thinking through and using the clues to figure something out. Now, we can have negative evidence, which is the absence of information. And so for that same question of when Nancy was married, if I looked at her father’s household in 1870, and she was not listed there anymore, and she had been up until then, then that would be some information that she was probably married.

Diana (37m 3s):
And her absence of being in that household could be used as negative evidence. Now we always have to use indirect and negative evidence together with a lot of other evidence. It doesn’t just stand on its own. So what are some other scenarios if she wasn’t in her father’s household 1870? Well, maybe she wasn’t married, but she was just living with another family and working for them, she was living away from home. So she wasn’t in the household, but she wasn’t necessarily married. So we use negative, which is a form of indirect evidence, and indirect evidence with lots of other moving pieces.

Diana (37m 45s):
And we use those to provide proof of a fact. And this is quite honestly why we have to write up our research. If we are using all the indirect and negative evidence to prove something, it doesn’t show up just putting it into a tree or on, you know, Family Search or Ancestry. People can look at that and not understand anything, but when we write it and we correlate it, that is where we can actually establish proof, which is why it’s so fun to be able to take all these pieces and put them together. Yeah.

Nicole (38m 18s):
And that’s why we have the written conclusion portion of the genealogical proof standard, because we can’t really say that something’s proven unless we are able to write it out clearly and logically with documentation. Wow, we went through all of the analysis and so now after you create your timeline, you can have columns for a source, information, evidence, and you can go through and analyze each event or piece of information from your timeline and see if it’s an original source or derivative or authored and what kind of information it is and then what kind of evidence. And in the Study Group, we usually have people who ask the question when you analyze an event in your timeline, and you’re trying to figure out what kind of evidence it provides do you look at your research objective that you’re doing for the project to decide if it’s direct evidence for that question?

Nicole (39m 11s):
Or do you look at the event itself and say, this provides direct evidence for the residence and the names. So Diana, what do we tell them?

Diana (39m 21s):
Well, I really liked to analyze the evidence just for the specific event that makes it a little more simple. So if we’re looking at a marriage record, we are going to say, yeah, that’s direct evidence for that marriage because there’s a record. And it answers the question of when did they get married? And if we’re looking at a census and we’re trying to decide relationships that aren’t clear, we might want to say it’s indirect evidence for a relationship. So I like to just do the evidence analysis specifically for the event, each event in the timeline.

Nicole (39m 57s):
Yeah. When I did my Lucinda Keaton timeline, my question was who is the father of Lucinda Keaton? And then all of the things on my timeline, didn’t tell me the name of her father so I just put indirect for all of them. So that wasn’t that useful to me. So I think what it is is that you can’t apply a specific label to each event as being direct or and direct or negative, because there’s so many different questions you could be asking of that information. And each question that you asked could give you a different type of evidence, right? So it’s a little bit easier to do this in a chronology or in something where you write out more discussion, you can say, well, this provides direct evidence for the names of the people in the household, but it provides indirect evidence that their relationship is parent child because it’s prior to 1880 and it doesn’t show, you know, if this is the parent and this is a child that just shows they’re all living in the household together.

Nicole (40m 53s):
So you can really kind of talk it out and figure out what’s direct, what’s indirect. And then you’ll also find some negative evidence too. And one of my timelines that I did, it was glaringly obvious that after 1830, the man did not live in that place anymore because he was absent from the census and absent from the tax records. And then there was a land sale of his heirs. And so I saw a big piece of negative evidence that he had disappeared. And so I guess that he had died right about then. So I did put that piece of negative evidence in my timeline, but it was just kind of an interesting entry on the timeline because it was kind of by itself.

Nicole (41m 33s):
And it was based on a few other sources.

Diana (41m 37s):
Right. And it can be kind of tricky getting all of these things clear in your head, the source, information, evidence. So what I just like to tell anyone who’s trying this process, trying to do the timeline, do the best you can. And as your understanding grows, as your experience grows, it will get easier. You’ll you’ll get better. The important thing is just to really think through carefully the information that you’re using for your genealogy, this will help you to really clarify some things, look at it in a new way. Don’t stress too much about trying to decide if you have everything analyzed perfectly.

Nicole (42m 15s):
Yeah. The point of doing the analysis is to get the best information. So if you find that you have a lot of derivative records, then you’re going to want to try and find the original source. And if you find you’re basing a lot of conclusions on secondary information, you might want to try to find some records where the informant was an eyewitness, if possible.

Diana (42m 35s):
Right. That’s a great point. Sometimes this really points out that you are using just a lot of authored sources or derivative sources, and you’ve got to really go to work on finding some original, better, sources for the information.

Nicole (42m 50s):
And if you find that your evidence is a lot of it going to be indirect for your question, then just get ready to write a lot. Because the more you write, the more you can, weave in your indirect evidence.

Diana (43m 5s):
Right. Well, it’s been fun to revisit evidence analysis and think through all those categories. Again, it’s always good to go back to the basics with our genealogy and the research process. So I hope everybody listening got some new ideas and maybe you’re re-energized to go revisit some of your research.

Nicole (43m 23s):
All right. Have a great day everyone. And we’ll talk to you again next week.

Diana (43m 29s):
All right. Bye bye.

Nicole (43m 29s):
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