RLP 116: Revisiting Research Planning

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 116: Revisiting Research Planning. 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):
Hello everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro I’m Nicole Dyer co-host of the podcast, and I’m here with my mother, accredited genealogist, Diana Elder. Hello mom. How are you?

Diana (56s):
I’m doing well today. Thank you. And I’m enjoying some beautiful weather here in Utah. We’re finally getting that nice, mild, sunny weather that September often offers us. So trying to get outside and enjoy my flowers and things before it freezes. Cause that’s coming.

Nicole (1m 14s):
Yeah, you guys have to worry about that so soon, but we don’t usually have freezing weather here in Arizona until January or February, but I’m excited because we started our hybrid learning. And so my children went back to school yesterday and they’re very happy to be back in the classroom.

Diana (1m 33s):
That’s great. I think that this is so interesting this whole situation with the children having to be home for school from school for so long that all of my friends that have children in school are saying the exact same thing. They are so happy to be back. So I guess that’s a silver lining. That’s come out of this whole situation that we appreciate things that we just took for granted before.

Nicole (1m 53s):
That’s true. What have you been working on?

Diana (1m 57s):
Well, I just did a quick little project over the weekend that was for a client and this client had a little family mystery that was interesting. And it was fun because it was pretty easy to solve, it’s 20th century research, and there were a lot of records, but the client’s ancestor had, upon his death the family found a birth certificate that had a different surname than the one he’d gone his entire life and that he’d always been known by and they were really wondering what this other surname was all about. And so I did some research and found that he always went by his mother’s maiden name throughout his life.

Diana (2m 38s):
And so the father’s name was just on his birth certificate and the father was named in the marriage record, but he never went by that surname and the censuses didn’t show that. So anyway, it was fun just to solve that really quickly and write up a fast little report and send the client the answer to a question. You know, sometimes these projects are not as easily solved, but that one was nice and easy and fast, and that was fun.

Nicole (3m 5s):
Oh, that’s a good story. Sometimes we get confused by name changes and think that there’s something odd going on. But often it’s just a simple reason that they were living with a certain family member and they just decided to start going by that name. I read an article in the NGSQ about that. And there was a whole proof argument showing how this child had gone by his mother’s surname for a lot of his life, but also was known by his father’s surname. So it was a really interesting case.

Diana (3m 35s):
Yeah, I think that can really confuse us. And sometimes we can think that there’s something that they’re trying to hide by the situation, but I think sometimes it was just easier if you’re living in a family and everybody has that surname for you to start using that surname.

Nicole (3m 50s):
Yeah. And we see that a lot with stepchildren who their mother gets remarried and the mother’s name is now changed. And so then often on the censuses, the children will be listed with their stepfather’s surname just because that’s how the census taker wrote it down.

Diana (4m 5s):
Right. And that was one of our challenges when we first started doing family history. And I remember that with one of the records, you figured out one of the census records where our ancestor was going by the stepfather’s name and that’s why we could never find her. So that was fun.

Nicole (4m 20s):
It was a fun moment. I do remember that I was about 16 years old.

Diana (4m 24s):
You were, and you came running out to tell me about it. I was out in the garden, it was great.

Nicole (4m 30s):
Well, I’ve been working on editing my proof argument that I wrote for ProGen. And as I was rereading it, I realized that I never cited anything about the father’s probate or will or land records, and the last place that he moved to when he was older. And so I wondered why I hadn’t done that. And I went back and I researched and looked for those records and I realized that that county had burned. And so it’s a really interesting case now that I think about it because he moved from one county that had burned, Hawkins county, Tennessee to another county that had burned, which was in Washington county, Arkansas. So it really was a case of a lot of missing records and we had to use DNA to piece everything together and the DNA was very useful.

Nicole (5m 18s):
So I’m excited to share that when it’s done.

Diana (5m 20s):
Oh, that’s a great example of why you have to use DNA sometimes for these projects with two burn counties, no less.

Nicole (5m 28s):
Yup. All right. The listener spotlight today is from listener named D T. And this was a comment on YouTube on our episode RLP, number 12 about productivity and the review says, “writing down your next day steps after your current research, sounds like a great way to dump your brain so that you aren’t fixated on still working or remembering the research you did. I think it would be helpful to have less to remember and more brain power to concentrate with. Thanks.” And I love that comment because it reminds me how useful it is to get all of your thoughts out on paper or on your to-do list or wherever it is that you’re, you’re getting everything out. And a lot of the time when we finish a research session of genealogy, we’re getting out all those thoughts into our notes and our research log.

Nicole (6m 14s):
And it’s so important that we do that so that we can use our brain power to think about the next steps and not be focused on trying to remember the analysis that we just did.

Diana (6m 23s):
Yes, it is so important to write things down somewhere. I was just thinking, as you read that, that I love my little research notebook that I have right on my desk, because every day I write three or four things that I really need to get done that day. And then of course if they don’t, they get shifted to the next day, but I’m just looking at my notebook right now and I have all these little different notes. That’s a great place to keep track of things too. You know, like if someone is giving me an address and I don’t necessarily need to record that in a Google sheet or anything, I just need to write it down somewhere. And it’s so nice. It’s just in my notebook and I don’t have little pieces of paper all over the place. So I really love my research notebook. It’s kind of a fun thing to like that can see all the different things I’ve been doing.

Nicole (7m 6s):
So great. Like a little journal.

Diana (7m 7s):
Yeah. Well, let’s jump into what we’re going to talk about today and that is Research Planning. And this is the fourth part in our series of revisiting the Research Like a Pro process. So, so far we’ve talked about creating a focus objective from one of our research questions. We have looked through our tree or we have that nagging brick wall problem that we want to try to solve. So we have created an objective around that for this specific research session. And then we have accumulated all of our sources and put those into a timeline and analyze them to see how valuable they are. A lot of times we hear people say, wow, I didn’t realize I was using all derivative sources.

Diana (7m 51s):
You know, they’re just using things that are indexed and they hadn’t gone further to get the originals. And that timeline can really point that up. And then we talked about locality research and how to pick one or two localities from that timeline that will help you further your research for the subjective, and then to go out and grab some helps from wherever you can, you know, Family Search Wiki or other websites that have helps for your specific locality. So you can learn about the records. You can learn about the history, the geography, the laws, give yourself a foundation in that location so that you know, what you’ve been missing and what you need to start working with kind of things that you haven’t used in your research.

Diana (8m 37s):
And then today we are going to talk about taking all of those first steps and putting them into a research plan. We have our objective, we know what we’ve already found, and we have a really good idea now of what records are available in that locality and what things were happening that area. So now we can focus on records that might answer our research question and we can prioritize because some things will be easier to get ahold of, or there’ll be online. And we’re going to want to actually have a prioritized strategy for our research plan.

Nicole (9m 12s):
So when you get started making your research plan, you’ll probably want to revisit your objective and just see if you need to tweak it at all. Because after you have reviewed your timeline and analyze the sources, maybe you have noticed that you have a really good guess for who the parent of your person is, or you kind of have a more specific thing you want to focus on. So you can tweak your objective and the research plan and decide this phase of research will be to figure out if so-and-so is the father of my research subject. And that can be a more focused phase of research for your overarching research question, which could be who are the parents of so-and-so.

Nicole (9m 53s):
So if you want to do that, then the research plan is a good time to do it. And to just review your timeline and see what jumps out at you, maybe you can also tweak some of the identifiers in your objective. Like if you notice that somebody had land and then the land was sold by their heirs, you can put in an estimate for their death date and place. Maybe you didn’t have that before. And sometimes that can be really helpful when you’re Research Planning to recognize that they were deceased after a certain time. So that can guide you toward records during their life, or guide you to look for records that would have been created at their death and get more specific.

Nicole (10m 35s):
So revisit your objective and tweak it if you need to, and this will help guide your plan.

Diana (10m 40s):
Right. That’s great advice. I think sometimes we get started and we’ve forgotten some of the things in our research. And so we do need to change our objective up a little bit after those initial steps. So after our objective is just how we want it, we want to create a summary of known facts, and you just use your timeline for this. You’ve already put everything into your timeline, but I like to make this just a simple table. The timeline has got a lot of information in it, your source citation, your analysis, a lot of details. And I like to take a simple table in my document and just put the date, the event, the place and how I know it.

Diana (11m 24s):
So, you know, 1850 census. So for instance, if I’m wondering, how do I know again, that this ancestor was born in Kentucky? I can just look at that summary of known facts and go, oh, it was this and this that’s us, or it was the death certificate of a child.

Nicole (11m 40s):
Yeah, that’s really good because sometimes we’ll have things in our timeline that we realize are secondary information or it’s authored, and it’s just not very high quality. So we can leave that out of our known facts. If we don’t feel that it’s important, or maybe it’s some kind of information that we’ve decided isn’t useful or credible because of our analysis. So in the summary of known facts, you can just put those facts that you really think are reliable. You may not know for sure yet, but you can just put in whatever you think is going to be the most useful to guide your plan, right? So the next step is to create a working hypothesis. And this is where you just share a quick summary of what you think you’re going to find and what records could reveal that.

Nicole (12m 26s):
So it could be just an educated guess about when the person died, if that’s your objective or a guess about where the parents may have lived. If you’re looking for the parents, sometimes you’ll have a guess like a true hypothesis of who the parent is. And you can put that there, or maybe you have a very open-ended hypothesis for who the parent is that it was somebody who was born in Georgia around this time. Maybe they lived in a certain county because that’s where the marriage occurred for the daughter. So it doesn’t have to be a specific name. It can just be what you know, and if you have the 1880 census of a person that says their parents’ birth places, maybe that’s all you’ll have. It just really depends on what you have in your known facts.

Nicole (13m 6s):
So using those known facts, create a hypothesis that states what you think the answer will be and what records could test that hypothesis.

Diana (13m 14s):
Going back to our listener comment about doing a brain dump. I kind of liken this hypothesis to that. This is where you actually write out what you think happened. A lot of people get a little stuck on this and they are thinking, well, I don’t know what happened, how am I supposed to imagine what happened? But you know, you have some little clues from things. And so you can have a hypothesis that you’re going to test. One of the things that I like to do is to also put in a little bit about methodology that I’m going to use. Sometimes I’ll say something like, well, this would benefit from a census study, or this would benefit from really looking at all the probate. Some of those ideas that have just been generating in the back of your mind, you can put that into your hypothesis about how you would like to approach this problem and what you think you might be able to find from doing that.

Nicole (14m 5s):
Okay, I am going to read an example of a hypothesis. We probably read this on the first episode about creating a hypothesis, but I’m just going to read it again. So if your objective is to find the father of Cynthia Dillard, here’s what the hypothesis could be. Cynthia Dillard’s father was probably born in Virginia about 1795 or earlier. He moved to Georgia by 1815, where Cynthia was born. He was living in the vicinity of Morgan county, Georgia by 1833, when Cynthia married, Thomas Beverly Royston. He possibly died in Georgia or in Alabama, if he also migrated to Alabama like Cynthia and her husband Thomas Royston.

Nicole (14m 45s):
So you can see, we don’t know the name of Cynthia’s father. We just have these clues from records, from Cynthia’s life that we can use to kind of make a guess about where to look

Diana (14m 54s):
Exactly. And I think it’s fun to write the hypothesis. I really enjoy that step. It’s interesting because we talk a lot about how, when you write things, connections form in your brain. And I think the hypothesis is a really good example of this. Sometimes I’ll feel a little scattered with my research and I’ve looked at all these records on my timeline and it made my summary, but, I am still just not wrapping my head around what I need to look for, what I need to do. But as soon as I start writing, somehow those connections start forming and I’m able to pull some things together to decide how to approach this research project. .

Nicole (15m 28s):
Absolutely and you may have heard in Genealogy Standards and things like that, that you need to have something to test with records. And that’s really what the hypothesis gives you. It gives you something that you can go and test and see if it’s true with records. So if Cynthia Dillard’s father was living in Morgan county, when she got married in 1933, we can go test that by looking to see if there were any people with the surname of Dillard living around them in that place.

Diana (16m 0s):
Absolutely. So after we have got that good working hypothesis written out, then the next step in the research plan is to identify the sources to search. So we’ve got an idea of what we want to do. If it was the census study or the probate or marriage. Now we have to go look at our locality guide and see where to find those records. Are they in the Family Search catalog? Are they online? Do we need to write a courthouse? Do we need to look on Ancestry.com? Do we need to write our aunt who we think might have the record? You know, there’s just so many different sources for trying to answer our research question and to further our objective.

Diana (16m 42s):
So this is again, an opportunity to kind of do a brain dump. I like to do a bulleted list and I just looked through my locality guide. I get all my ideas in there for the different places, the different specific sources I could search. So I like to be specific enough that it’s actually a working plan. So in other words, I wouldn’t just put well search the marriage records of Morgan county, Georgia. I would go look on the Family Search catalog, get the actual microfilm online collection and paste that right in there, or make myself a note that I would have to go to a Family History Center to view that or to the Family History Library or to write to the Georgia archives.

Diana (17m 26s):
I’d be really specific because how are we going to prioritize this list if we don’t really understand what that source is and how we’re going to obtain it?

Nicole (17m 36s):
Good idea. I like that thought that we should understand the sources before we can prioritize them. All right. So the next step is to prioritize your research strategy. And this is a fun step. You just get to decide which records you’re going to search first. And sometimes you prioritize based on access. So if a record is online or if it’s indexed, the ease of access might cause you to prioritize it first. And another thing you might look at is the ability of that record to answer your research question. So if there’s a record set, that’s most likely going to answer your question you’re going to want to put that higher up on your list because you could spend a lot of time researching and other collections that are easy.

Nicole (18m 17s):
But if the one thing you need to do is just search in this probate collection that’s only available on microfilm somewhere then maybe you need to just focus on that and get that one thing done before you do anything else. Because if that contains the answer to your objective, then you have saved yourself a lot of time. So there’s a few things to consider when you prioritize. And it’s always different for every project in each person. So just consider the access and the ability of that record to answer your question.

Diana (18m 47s):
And I like to say just do about five things in your research plan, because sometimes you answer your question in the first one or two, and if you’ve got this long list of 20 things, you’ve wasted some time. I learned that when I was doing accreditation, that you should just list about five things and then go from there. So let me go through my example that we are using for this whole series of revisiting the Research Like a Pro process and that’s from Nancy Briscoe’s life. My objective was to learn more about her early life. I didn’t know much about her when she was living in Arkansas, kind of on the border of Arkansas and Missouri.

Diana (19m 27s):
Know a lot more about the family once they moved out to Texas and then up into Indian territory, and that became Oklahoma, but I wanted to know more about what was going on with her. So I created this hypothesis, Nancy E Briscoe experienced the Civil War as a young woman growing up on the border of Arkansas and Missouri. The devastation of war precipitated the move of Nancy and her Confederate veteran husband, Richard Fraiser to Texas by 1870 and shaped the remainder of her life. So I didn’t really know for sure, you know, what it would have been like for her in the Civil War, but I knew the Civil War was happening and I knew it was taking place in that area. So I just made a hypothesis that this played an important part in her life.

Diana (20m 12s):
And I wanted to learn more about that now in looking for identified sources, you know, this is a little bit different type of an objective. I’m not looking for a father or a spouse, so I’m not looking for some of the records that we typically might use. But what I instead wanted to focus on were county histories to learn specifics about the history right there, where she was living. And then I also wanted to learn just a little bit more detail about when the family moved back and forth, because I had her being born in different states, you know, and I realized they were on the border from my locality research by wanting to get a little bit better idea of perhaps when they moved.

Diana (20m 55s):
So I wanted to look at some tax records and I was pretty sure that I had already searched all the marriage records. I could back when we first started, because she is a direct line ancestor, but I had not kept track of those in a research log. And so I put that in my research ideas as well that I could go check out marriage records for her. And often you’ll find this, that you think you’ve maybe search something, but if you have no record of it, it’s great to put it in your research plan because once you do that and it’s in your research log and it’s written up in your report, you don’t need to do that search again, that can really save you time down the road.

Diana (21m 36s):
And then once I had the list of sources of things that I could look at and specifics, you know, what books I could look in and what collections, then I prioritized everything. And I decided to do those county histories very first because those books were both digitized. And I knew I could look at those really easily. Another thing that I had wanted to do was to look for a census conundrum, I had a person show up at one of the censuses, I wasn’t sure who they were and I decided I wanted to put that in my research plan to see if I could quickly figure them out. I put in as number three, to view maps of the area to go really local with the maps.

Diana (22m 19s):
And I wanted to research the Civil War companies and battles because Nancy mentioned specific companies and things that happened in the Civil War for her husband and they’re right there in our pension application. So I wanted to research them and see if that panned out, you know, did she have a good memory? Does she remembering this correctly, where these things actually taking place somewhere that makes sense? That ended up being really only four items for my research plan, but I love having it really specific. So I could just go through them one by one and do the research and enter it into my log.

Nicole (22m 59s):
Fantastic. That’s such a good research strategy. I like this plan because it’s a little bit unique. You’re really trying to understand some of the historical and geographic context. So it really makes sense that you’re going to focus on those county histories and some of those maps and things.

Diana (23m 17s):
Well, I was just trying to think of some of the common questions that we get, because we’re trying to answer those in the series. And I think maybe one of those things is, and I already mentioned it is how much should I put in this and how exactly do I put this together? So any thoughts on that?

Nicole (23m 38s):
Yeah, we mentioned before, it’s a good idea to keep it simple. And part of the reason of that is that you may find the answer in your first or second step. So if you’ve gone and made a very long and detailed research plan, that could have been a waste of time. If when you do your first or your second search, you find the answer. You may end up wanting to do the rest of the searches anyway, if they are applicable to your ancestor, but it’s good to just be flexible and also continue making your plan as you go. So if you have one or two things that you really think are important to check first, before you make any more of your plan than just plan for two things. And then when that phase of research is done, you can decide to either write your report or continue on with making more sources to search in your plan.

Nicole (24m 25s):
So I think that’s a really helpful step to think about the fact that you don’t have to end your research. As soon as you finish everything in your plan. If you want to keep planning more sources to search, you can, sometimes this happens if you have negative searches for your first few sources, and you want to try a few more things that you had brainstormed earlier, it’s okay for your plan to be flexible. And if you do that, it doesn’t mean that you’re chasing a rabbit hole. It just means that you are being flexible. And you are thinking about what you learned from the first few steps you took.

Diana (24m 60s):
I like that philosophy. And you know, you really have to be thinking about your project and the fact that you do want to write this up. So you want to have a stopping point sometime. And that can be kind of tricky with this negative searches, because you are going to be putting that into your report and you don’t want to go on and on and on searching for things. Cause then when you go to write it up, that might seem kind of overwhelming. So you might be just sort of tired after you’ve done your five or six, or maybe it’s turned out to be seven searches. And maybe it is time to stop and start writing. If you haven’t already started writing things up and every project will be a little bit different.

Diana (25m 40s):
So don’t be too rigid in how you have to do this, you know, use the basic structure of Research Planning, but then fit it to whatever project you are working on at the time.

Nicole (25m 51s):
And I’m glad you mentioned that there needs to be a stopping point where you can write your report. I think if we just continue researching until we find the answer, sometimes we get bogged down. And so I wouldn’t go too long without writing a report if you’re going to forget what you learned in your research. So if you’ve been working on it, you know, every other day for a week or two, you’ll probably have a natural stopping point where you’re going to have something new come up, you’re starting a new class. You know, you’re going somewhere. You don’t have much time to work on it anymore. It’s a good idea to write your report before that happens. It’s so that you can get out from your brain, everything that you learned during this phase of research. So it’s good to have those defined phases.

Diana (26m 34s):
It really is. And I say a lot in the book, consider yourself your own client. And for my client work, I’ve only been hired to do 10 or 20 hours. I haven’t been hired to research indefinitely and we can use that same philosophy for our own research. You know, I’m getting to see this as a 10 hour project. And so when you come to the end of that research plan, write it up. And the fun thing is that if you didn’t get to some of the things, you can put those in future research suggestions. You know, we always have ideas of what to do next. And that’s the beauty of having that section, that future research that will go into the report. So let’s say you are having that situation where you’re going on a trip and you only got two things researched, but you found a lot of good stuff, put numbers three, four, and five in your future research.

Diana (27m 24s):
And just write up what you found in numbers. One and two. So there’s a lot of ways to look at this and a lot of ways to use Research Planning to help you become a much better researcher. So I hope everybody will go try doing a plan. If you had never done it, try the process, try it out and then let us know how it worked for you.

Nicole (27m 45s):
All right, everyone. Have a great weekend. We’ll talk to you next week. Bye bye.

Diana (27m 49s):
Bye bye.

Nicole (28m 27s):
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.