RLP 118: Revisiting Research Logs

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 118: Revisiting Research Logs. 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 (46s):
Hi everyone and welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer, and I’m here with Diana Elder, my mother and accredited genealogist. Hi Diana, how are you?

Diana (54s):
I’m good. Nicole. Glad to be here today.

Nicole (57s):
What have you been working on?

Diana (59s):
I’ve been working on DNA, just continuing with the DNA practicum, trying to solve difficult cases and then write them up. It’s been really interesting with this last case. I always say that it’s in the writing things up, that things come together and that was especially true in this one. I had all these different pieces of DNA evidence and documentary evidence, and it’s really satisfying to bring it all together into a written summary or a report and get your thoughts in order. You know, you have all these hypotheses and these ideas floating around, but when you have to put them into words, it really makes a difference. So that’s what I’ve been working on this last few days.

Nicole (1m 39s):
Yeah. I’ve been working on a timeline and trying to separate a bunch of men of the same name and I’ve had that same feeling too, like this isn’t going to feel sorted out completely until I write a conclusion.

Diana (1m 51s):
And I think that’s why this makes a difference doing the whole process and ending with something written because otherwise you can feel like your research is so scattered and that you never ever come to a conclusion because you don’t, unless you write it, you can’t come to some kind of a conclusion.

Nicole (2m 8s):
All right. Well, our spotlight today is from the Genealogy at [indistinguishable]’s and the title is Amazing Podcast. And he said, “this podcast helped me a lot with my brick walls and how to do the research where you don’t have random papers everywhere. Question: currently, I am working on a merge on Family Search family tree, and the other person has tons of people working on the ancestor, but has no sources. Who do I talk to? Or what should I do? Thank you for this amazing podcast.” So thank you for the review. That’s really nice of you. And as to your question about the Family Search tree and doing merges, you can try to contact the people who’ve added the information about the other person, and I would do that, but in case they don’t respond what I usually do for merges is I review each piece of information about the two people that you are considering merging, and then any differences between them and try to find sources for that person who has no sources attached.

Nicole (3m 6s):
So if there are no differences and there’s no sources attached, then you might be okay to merge them. But if there are differences like a different spouse, different child, different dates, places pay specific attention to the places because sometimes people might have the same dates, like if they’re just a general year, but the places are different. So if there is something different and you’re not able to tell if it’s the same person or not, for sure, then don’t merge yet, just keep researching and kind of keep track and your research notes in a research log of what you find. And then hopefully you can build a profile for each person. And if it turns out that they have all the same information and there’s just some conflicting dates of birth, then you can go ahead and merge them.

Nicole (3m 48s):
But if they did live in different places and have different relationships, then hopefully you’ll be able to tell that they’re different people. So good luck on your merge.

Diana (3m 57s):
Yeah, that’s a challenge. And I love everything that you said, Nicole, especially about if you’re not sure just to keep researching until it becomes really clear because it is a big deal to merge people and we don’t want to merge identities. We’ve all seen that happen way too often. So really good to get the research down first. Well, let’s get to our subject to the day, which is Revisiting Research Logs, and in our original podcast Research Like a Pro number eight, we talked all about Research Logs and we talked about the different kinds that you may be have used in the past, or have heard about like paper research Logs, electronic research Logs, or the online program Research Ties, but today we’re going to focus in on electronic research Logs because that is what we are using and we teach that to everyone because let’s face it, we are in a digital age, and even though there is a place for paper occasionally going into an archive or such, the majority of our work is usually done at our computer and with an electronic research log, we can just keep track of everything that we’re looking at in all of our notes.

Diana (5m 8s):
So we also introduced a fun new way to keep Research Logs in episode 88, where we talked about DNA Research Logs and we introduced Air Table. Honestly, now I love Air Table and I am starting to use that for of course, all my DNA projects, but also when I have a complicated research project in traditional research, such as if I’m researching the FAN club and I’m keeping track of a lot of data, then Air Table is proving to be very, very helpful. Air Table is very similar to Excel or to Google sheet.

Diana (5m 49s):
It is a spreadsheet, but it has a little bit more capability to link between the tables within that spreadsheet. So it becomes more of a database. And if you’re interested in learning about that, you can listen to that episode 88 and experiment a little bit with it. Now, some people do like to use a word document or a Google doc and do research notes instead of a research log. And they would put all their logs searches into a table, or just having paragraphs for each search that was made. And if that works for you, that is great. Or if you want to explore something like that, I highly encouraged to try that.

Diana (6m 30s):
You know, a lot of times people want us to tell them exactly how to do something and you know, you’ve all heard me say it before you need to do what works with your brain, because we look at things a little bit differently. So I highly encourage everyone to try out a few different ways of doing a research site to see what you like the best, because you might decide that doing free form or a table in a Word doc works great for you. Or you may just think, okay, I got to use a spreadsheet. So here’s the reason we like using spreadsheets. I love to be able to sort the columns. That’s huge because I am often entering in a bunch of different data and I have a column for the date of the event.

Diana (7m 14s):
And when I sort by that column, then my research log becomes the flow timeline, it is fabulous. All the records, regardless of what date they took place on can be automatically sorted. Or if I want to sort by just all the probate searches I’ve done or all the land records, or maybe all the records in a specific locality, it makes it so easy to do that. So that sorting function is huge. As I’m trying to look at my research and make sense of everything in air table, you can group different types of searches together, and that’s a really, really nice function. So for instance, in a DNA project, you are often researching the trees of people that are your DNA matches, and you don’t necessarily want to have an entire research log for each tree, right?

Diana (8m 8s):
That would be so many! So in AirTable you can put all that research in a single log and then you can group and you will be able to see all the research you have done for that specific DNA match. And that’s a really a slick way to keep it organized and not have it be overwhelming with the amount of data. So I highly recommend using an electronic research log and really considering exploring AirTable as something to get you even more organized with your DNA and your complicated research like the FAN club.

Nicole (8m 46s):
Absolutely. And even if you don’t use AirTable, hopefully you’ll use Excel or Google spreadsheet so that you can at least sort your columns. So why should you keep a research log? Well, this is one of the main habits that separates the hobbyist genealogist from the professional or serious genealogist. And we’ve noticed that when we started using research logs, that’s when we really started making a lot more progress with our difficult cases. So if you want to do a professional level research, you have to keep track of your research that you’re doing. And like we said, you can do this in a spreadsheet, or you can also do it in a word style document in research notes, either way. The key principle is that you keep track of the sources that you consulted.

Nicole (9m 29s):
Another part of that is creating a citation. The first time you look at a source and save the information to get back to that source again, and then also abstract or transcribe the information that you find in the source and analyze the details that you’re finding in your research log or notes so that you can figure out what to do next, and you can make connections between sources. So another reason to do your research log is it keeps you from redoing previous research. And we all know how important that is. We don’t want to redo things we’ve already done. Another thing is that your research log helps you notice patterns and clues. It helps you get down all the notes from the record in the same place that you can see everything all at once.

Nicole (10m 11s):
It also helps you to keep track of your negative results. And sometimes these negative search results can lead to negative evidence in your report. So you can use what you didn’t find, where things might’ve been expected to be found to come to some kind of conclusion. Another thing that is great about a research log is when you take a break from your research for a while, maybe a week or a month or something, and then you need to come back and continue the research, it helps to be able to quickly review what you have already found by just reviewing your log. Have you ever had the experience where you started on research logs, but then you didn’t really continue with it, and then you come back to it later and you’re disappointed to see that it only has one or two items in it.

Nicole (10m 51s):
So this has happened to me before, and it is disappointing because, you know, you did research, but you just didn’t keep track of it. So don’t do that. Make sure you keep track of what you find and save that research to help your future self, to have more success.

Diana (11m 7s):
I like the reference to your future self, because we all realize that we do this research, we get really excited about a project and then life happens and we don’t get back to something for weeks or days or months or years, and how great to have that research recorded. So you’re not starting from square one. Well, let’s go through the different elements of a research Logs, and we’re going to use our example that we’re using in this series of my Nancy Briscoe project. And I talked last time about doing source citations for her pension application and for county histories. So I thought this time, I would talk a little bit about how I log county history information, because as we’re going through a county history, we are looking for information specifically on our ancestor, if possible, but then also anything that will give us more context about their life.

Diana (12m 1s):
And often that’s on different pages and scattered throughout the book. And we want to take note of all of those things, because how often is this scenario happened to you? You’re thumbing through a book and you’re noticing all this great information, or, you know, you’re looking at a digitized book online, but you don’t record that anywhere. And then later on you think, oh yeah, where was that? And that’s a waste of time. So I’m going to show you how you can take research using county history as an example, and record it so that you have got that information right at your fingertips. So the objective for this research project, I will just repeat it so that you remember what we’re doing.

Diana (12m 43s):
The objective for this project is to discover more about the life of Nancy E Briscoe born seven, February, 1847 in Benton county, Arkansas. She married Richard Frazier about 1865 in Missouri and died 30 January, 1924 in Love county, Oklahoma. So I did narrow my focus to being the years that Nancy would have been a young woman. And so one of my things on my research plan was to search county histories. And I found this fabulous county history that was digitized, which is even better. So let’s go through how I logged this.

Diana (13m 22s):
I actually have three different entries from this county history with three different pieces of information. So first of all, I put the date, I searched it. So my research log has that objective at the top. So I don’t forget what I’m supposed to be doing. And then I have a column for the date and that’s helpful because we forget what day we’re doing when we did this research, we forget the year we did this research. And so it’s very helpful to know when we did it because we may want to go back to that website or we may want to go check that database again, in case maybe something new has been added in the years since we checked it last. So I always put the date and then I have the repository. And in this case it was on Family Search.

Diana (14m 3s):
It was a digitized book. If it’s a repository that you’ve visited and you’re recording old research, then you would put down, you know, the county court house of whatever county or a historical society or an archive, you would put that information. And you could make a note that you now have it in your own research file. If you want, you know, this is for you. This is not something that you’re going to be giving to anyone unless they request it. But it’s for you to know where things are and where things came from. So I put Family Search and then there’s a column for the URL or a call number or microfilm number. And generally, because we’re researching a lot online, that will be the URL.

Diana (14m 47s):
And I really like having my URL in my research log so that I can quickly get to a record. Again, I don’t want to go look on my Family Search family tree or my Ancestry tree, and try to find that record that’s attached to a person. If that’s in my log then it’s super easy to find it. And if it’s a collection that was negative, then I can quickly go back to that and check details. Then I have a column for what I’m searching for. And this is where you can put in the type of record. Are you searching for probate? Are you searching for land for tax for the 1850 census, what have you? And so in mine, I just put in, I was searching for our county history of McDonald county from about 1860 to 1875.

Diana (15m 30s):
That was my sweet spot there of research. And the entry that I found was for 1861. And so I’ve put in the specific date. So let’s say I am looking for burial information for a person. I find that they died and were buried in 1902. You know, I would put that date in there and put it whatever date the event happened. And if you are having a negative search, let’s say, you cannot find your person on the 1870 census, which is common if you’re working in the south, you can put 1870, you are searching for that year and even though it’s a negative search, that is the specific year you were searching for, and that will help you to locate that in your log and think, okay, I did search this thoroughly.

Diana (16m 17s):
So after the date of the event, then I like to put the locality and there’s a couple different ways of doing locality. You can do the state first and then the county and then the city, or you can do the traditional city county state. The reason why you might want to start with the state is if you sort by that column, then you’ll have all the Arkansas records come up together and all the Missouri records come together. So that is something to play with and think about, if you are wanting to sort by locality, then we have the source citation. For this source citation I have the complete title of the book, it was McDonald and Newton County Sections of Godspeed’s Newton, Lawrence, Berry, and McDonald Counties History.

Diana (17m 9s):
And then I have the publication information. It’s a layered citation because it is digitized. So I have the digital information on Family Search. So as I was looking at the book, I created the citation and that’s in that source citation column. And then I have extracted pertinent information to my research case. So I wrote in my results, a comments column that this was a list of taxpayers in 1861 from McDonald county. And it gives the township and range and if they were Confederate, it was marked with a C, and there was RT Frazier, T21 range 30.

Diana (17m 50s):
So township 21 range 30 and there’s no C. So I thought that was really interesting. It said the list was taken for the purposes of the Confederacy and the noting of whether in the Confederate army or not based on the recollections of Abraham Pierce and others. So these county histories, you never know what you’re going to find. Now, RT Frazier could be an ancestor of Nancy Brisco’s husband, Richard Frazier. It could be him, or it could be one of his brothers or uncles. There were a lot of family members in this area. And I thought it was really interesting that he was mentioned as not being a Confederate because some of the family was Confederate.

Diana (18m 33s):
So this makes me wonder if we had both sides of the families on both sides of the civil war, but regardless of that, because this was a family name and they were in the right area, I just made a note of who was there and those details. Then I have in my source citation of the Research Logs, I have the page number that that came from. So in the source citation, I add page 10. Now my next entry is from page 26. And this talks about how the Civil War battles caused great unrest in Southwest Missouri. So it’s just a little snippet about what it would have been like for Nancy. And then I have another entry on page 42 with more information on the condition of the area from 1861 to 64.

Diana (19m 21s):
So I broke apart those pieces out of the book and cited the specific page number. And it was nice because I simply just copied and pasted that citation for each line of the record and changed only the page number. That’s a really easy way to record a lot of information from a digitized book or evenly. If you’re doing something like a tax list and all the information’s the same for the citation, except for the year, and every year to just change the year in the citation, and then record the actual data. So the research log actually becomes such an easy way to keep track of all of these various searches.

Nicole (20m 3s):
Wow. That was a great rundown of all the parts of a Research Logs. So we get this question quite a bit. What is the difference between the timeline and the research log and can they be combined? So when we start the Research Like a Pro process, we talk about using a spreadsheet to make a timeline, to gather all the information that you already know about your research objective. So you’re kind of building this spreadsheet and then you build another spreadsheet for your research log. So some people wonder, you know, what’s the difference between the two, can we just combine them so you can, or you can keep them separate. It’s up to you. I’ll tell you some ideas for both. The timeline is only for facts that you found in your research that, you know, tie to your ancestor, but your Research Logs can include a lot of different results to conclude results for people with the same surname, negative results, where you didn’t find anything.

Nicole (20m 56s):
It can include research for people in the FAN club where you don’t know how they’re related to your research subject yet. And so your research log is a little bit more extensive and your timeline is just kind of for your conclusions and for things that, you know, belong to your research subject. So that’s kind of how I differentiate them in my mind. Another question that comes up is do you go back and update your timeline as you go throughout your research and finish up your research plan? And the answer is, yes, I do like to update my timelines because I like to have that as a resource for that ancestor going forward. So when I find something that belongs in the timeline for that ancestor, I will go ahead and just add it. Or sometimes I’ll wait until the conclusion of my report writing phase, and then I’ll update my timeline.

Nicole (21m 41s):
And that’s also the time when I go and update my tree and my online trees. And as well now, if you want to combine your timeline and your research log, you can do this. You just need to add a column for the year of the record, to your research log, and then you can sort by the date and then all of the negative results will go to the bottom. And all of the records that you found that had a date, we’ll go to the top and then you’ll be able to see them in chronological order. So it’s up to you, what you want to do, hopefully that helps you decide.

Diana (22m 13s):
I think it’s important to realize that you will get better at keeping your research log, the more you try it and you’ll learn how you like to do it. So take all of our ideas, put them to the test and then figure out a system that really works for you. So what do you do with your research log when you finished the research plan, you’ve gone through all of the different records that you wanted to search. Well, then you need to correlate to everything that you’ve found and write the report, which is what we were talking at the beginning of this podcast about bringing all the pieces together. And this is where your Research Logs will be so valuable because you will have everything right in front of you.

Diana (22m 53s):
And you can start to make connections when you are writing. It is a wonderful thing to have those citations already created, because as you’re writing, you know, you start getting into the flow of writing and, you know, I’m excited to write about what the county was like, and it’s so great. Cause I can cite that source, that county history and the citation is right there in my research log. Ready for me. I can look at the information and write about it. If I need to quickly go back to the record to verify something, I’ve got the URL. It is my working document for writing up a report. It also helps you correlate the records and use the negative searches as perhaps negative evidence.

Diana (23m 35s):
So if you’ve been doing this run of tax records and you can see right in front of you, that your ancestor was in the tax list for 10 years, and then he disappears, the lights go on in your head and you realize, oh, okay, he died, or he moved, what happened? And it helps you to analyze that, correlate that with other information you’ve discovered. And it’s all right there in your Research Logs for you to see, think of your Research Logs as the pieces of the puzzle, and then your research report, putting those pieces of the puzzle together.

Nicole (24m 11s):
Great. So I was talking about this at the beginning of the episode that sometimes it feels scattered before you write it up. One way to prevent that is to put all of your findings in the same research log or the same place. When you do that, you feel like you’re ready to start writing because you have everything that you’ve found altogether, and you can add it to your narrative as you go. And you can just go entry by entry and start to put that into an outline. I really like to build an outline sometimes when you are feeling like you have a lot of scattered information and another way to do it is just to sort your Research Logs by locality or sort it by date, and then it doesn’t feel as scattered anymore.

Nicole (24m 51s):
So another thing that you might want to try using are software programs that help you with Research Logs, and one of them we’ve talked about before in a previous episode on Research Like a Pro, and that was on episode 90, if you want to listen to that, and it’s about Goldie May a Family Search research log and assistant that our friend Richard Miller built. And it’s basically just an automated way to track the websites that you’re looking at. And it helps you by starting with an objective and you go to Family Search and you just choose somebody in your tree. And then it builds some objective choices and then builds a Research Logs for you just based on where you’re clicking.

Nicole (25m 33s):
And it just keeps track of all these websites for you automatically. If you’re not keeping a research log, this could be a good place for you to start. It gives you some of the benefits, not all of them, but it gives you some of them. You can build your citation by adding a note to each item, to get the full benefit of using a Research Logs. We really suggest using a spreadsheet or somewhere where you can write out more detailed notes, but this is something that’s better than nothing. And then Research Ties is another program that allows you to create Research Logs and this works really well if you have one source that you’re extracting a lot of details and a lot of results from, and so you build a citation for that source and then you start logging all the results that you find.

Nicole (26m 13s):
So we’ll link to those in the show notes, and you can try them out if that’s something that interests you.

Diana (26m 18s):
All right. Great. I love talking about Research Logs. I’ve said this before, but I’m just going to say it again. I don’t feel like I’m doing real research unless I have my Research Logs open and I am recording my searches. Otherwise I feel like I’m just surfing and playing and not being productive. So try it out. See if you have the same experience, once you learn how to use Research Logs, I think you’ll never want to go back to just chasing bright, shiny objects.

Nicole (26m 45s):
And my final tip for Research Logs is that when you are researching and you have an idea to look something up, just kind of background information and context. And do you look at a Wikipedia article or are you looking at historical article and think I’m just doing this so that I understand and you don’t think to log it? Well, I suggest that you always log that because when you’re writing your report, you’re probably going to want to use that information that you’ve learned. And it would be good to include a citation to where you learned that from, because it might not be common knowledge. And when things are not common knowledge, it’s best to have a source citation for that. So even if you’re not sure if you will meet that piece of information, if you looked it up and you wanted to know, you’re probably going to want to remember where you found it.

Nicole (27m 28s):
So just log it anyway.

Diana (27m 31s):
Yeah. We hear a lot of people that are writing their research report for the first time. And that is one of the common things that they talk about is that they wish they would have logged all of those little searches that they didn’t think that they’d need and then they have to go do it again to put it in the report. Good. Identical.

Nicole (27m 48s):
All right, everybody, we hope you are having fun revisiting the Research Like a Pro process with us next week, we will talk about research reports. So we will talk to you then.

Diana (27m 58s):
All right. Bye bye everyone.

Nicole (28m 4s):
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.