RLP 140: Pre-1850 U.S. Census Research

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 140 Problem Solving with the Pre 1850 Census. 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. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (47s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you doing today?

Nicole (49s):
Great. I’ve been working on a proof argument lately and it’s coming along well,

Diana (53s):
It’s fun to work on those, but they take a lot of time. Don’t they?

Nicole (55s):
Yeah. What have you been working on or doing

Diana (59s):
Well, we’ve started our latest study group. This is number seven for Research Like a Pro, and I like to always do a project along with the group. So I am doing some pedigree analysis to figure out what I want to have for my objective. I did that SLIG course about Missouri and so I want to focus on one of my Missouri ancestors and I have a few brick walls there in Missouri. So I’m going to spend a little bit of time looking through our family tree and see what sounds like a good objective, a good project. So that’s always kind of a fun thing. Starting brand new with something in our own family history.

Nicole (1m 37s):
That’ll be nice to apply what you learned in the Missouri course.

Diana (1m 41s):
Well, for our announcements today, we have started our study group, as I just mentioned, but if you’re interested in joining us for a future study group, be sure to join our study group email list, and you can find that on Family Locket under the study group, we have our fall DNA study group that will start in September and we’ll be taking applications if you’d like to be a mentor for that. And the information on that is also on the website. If you’re interested in joining our courses or study groups, and you’re waiting for a good deal, we periodically have coupons that come out in our newsletter. So make sure you join the newsletter so you can get notice of those.

Diana (2m 24s):
And then you can join us in your journey to Research Like a Pro.

Nicole (2m 28s):
Well, today we get to talk about a fun subject, pre-1850 Census Research. And that is something that we both do quite a bit with our client research and our own research because inevitably people’s brick walls are before that 1850 Census, where it’s harder to identify individuals because they’re sometimes a tick mark in the household of someone else. So some of the challenges from pre-1850 Census research include incomplete schedules. You know, there’s been record loss of some of the states and counties, so we don’t have all of them. Of course, the main challenge is that only the head of household is named.

Nicole (3m 9s):
And then you will have men of the same name that you have to differentiate and try to figure out which one is the right one. And then dealing with a lot of boundary changes. As the United States grew from the 1780s to 1850, the Western boundaries were pushed and states grew and took in more settlers. And as the counties got larger, they split and new counties were created. So it’s really important to understand all of the boundary changes that were happening in this time period,

Diana (3m 42s):
Right? And because we only have tick marks on those censuses before 1850, all of those challenges together can make it seem like it’s just not worth your while and you can’t find anything, but of course we have so many strategies that we can use. So we’re going to talk about some of those, but before we start on that, just a little bit of a review of the United States census records. I think it’s just helpful to always learn a little bit more about the record type. So any of you listening, if you’ve been using the census for a long time, or whether you’ve just started your research, hopefully you can pick up a few clues about how to use them as we go through this podcast.

Diana (4m 23s):
Let’s think about why the United States government even started a census. Well, the first census was taken in 1790 and it’s because the government wanted to know about the population. They needed to know how many representatives each state was allowed. And they needed to know for taxation purposes, how many citizens there were as the government expanded as the country grew, questions were added and the census was taken every 10 years. And so it’s really interesting to look at every 10 years and see what questions were added. And as you think about the history of the time, you’ll realize by some of the questions where they are.

Diana (5m 5s):
So after the Civil War, they added a question in 1910 about if someone had been a member of the Union or Confederate army. And that was because it was about time to give pensions to veterans. And so that question was added. So take a look at all those little categories across the top of the census page and think about why the government maybe wanted to know the answer to that question. And then the other thing to remember is that that particular census record is just a snapshot of that household at that moment in time. And it’s possible that your people only lived in that specific area for a brief moment, and then they moved on, but they were caught on the census right there.

Diana (5m 51s):
And I have some examples of that. I have no other records from that area. And at other times we have our people in the same area and on census year after census year, they are still there. So we have lot of different situations to consider. Now the census records are probably one of the most easy records to track down because they’re on FamilySearch for free. They’re also on a lot of the partner websites, Ancestry.com, MyHeritage, and Find My Past. And if you cannot find your ancestor on one of the censuses, and you’re looking only on FamilySearch go try it on a different website because they have different indexers, different search engines.

Diana (6m 33s):
And maybe what you couldn’t find on one will show up on a different one. And I have done that several times using say FamilySearch and then found the family on Ancestry. So just a little tip

Nicole (6m 44s):
While you were talking, I thought of an example that I wanted to share it with about how there’s this, you know, it’s a snapshot in time. And I was looking at a census record yesterday for George Harrison Tharp. And I was expecting him to be in the 30 to 39 age range. However, he wasn’t there. His whole family was, you know, I could see that his wife was in the 30 to 39 age category. And then all of the children I expected to see plus a few more new children, but there was no man over 20. And I thought that was kind of odd. I thought maybe they just missed him. Well, then I found another enumeration for him going by his middle name in the adjoining county as Harrison Tharp.

Nicole (7m 31s):
And he was the only person listed. My current theory is that he was just living at his other property for that week or taking care of business or something. But the rest of his family was living at their other property. So for that point in time, when the enumerator came by, they enumerated his family in one place and him in another place. But he was still the head of the household, I think. So they must’ve just put his name. That’s my current theory, but I thought that was interesting.

Diana (7m 56s):
That’s interesting. You never know what’s going on with the situation. And then I have, we have another family because they’re your family too, that there are enumerated twice and the dates are two weeks apart. They’re in the same county, but they evidently had moved and it’s really fun to compare because the people in the household are listed quite differently. And it’s obvious that in one census, the husband gave the information and in the other of the wife did so again, it’ll just a little snapshot in time that the census cut them at two different locations.

Nicole (8m 29s):
Yeah. Well, let’s talk about some tips for finding your ancestors when you’re using indexed census records. It’s kind of tempting to not look at the image sometimes because the transcribed information sometimes seems to be all that you might need. However, it’s really important to look at the image because you can discover a lot more by looking at the handwriting. See if you agree with the way the listed the family’s name and also to look at the neighbors and who else was living in that area, along with your ancestors. So be sure to look at the image, it can be harder to read these pre-1850 census records.

Nicole (9m 15s):
Sometimes they’re really clear, but I have come across some that are really faded or really poor handwriting. And sometimes the handwriting is a little bit more archaic because it is further in the past. So sometimes the indexers have a hard time figuring out what it actually says, but when you know what you’re looking for, you can really tell. So when I saw an indexed entry for P H A R P, Pharp, I thought, oh, that’s probably Tharp. And sure enough, I looked and I could tell that it was Tharp not Pharp with a P-H.

Diana (9m 51s):
Yeah. It’s funny to see some of the indexing that comes about, but if you’ve ever had done index and you understand completely how you’re just looking at it out of the blue, you have no idea what it says.

Nicole (10m 1s):
Right? Well, especially if you don’t know that surname, like there’s certain names I’ve never heard of before. And so, you know, why would I know that it was supposed to be Tharp unless I’m familiar with that name and I know that that’s an actual surname, you know, some surnames just are not as common anymore, or we just have never heard them before.

Diana (10m 18s):
Right. That’s so true. I think it’s tempting, especially with those censuses before 1850, where it’s just tick marks, to go by the indexed record and use just what the indexer figured out about the number of males and females and their ages. But I always like to look at that myself and make sure that’s correct, because I have found instances where something was a little bit off with the tick marks and the column they were supposed to be in. Also on those records, I really liked to use all of the names. You know, usually it’s just the men because it’s the head of household. And sometimes you’ll have a woman has the head of the household, but I like looking at that whole list of people because that’s the community of the ancestor.

Diana (11m 3s):
Those are all the neighbors, those are the people around them. So you always want to look at the image even when it’s those pre-1850 images. So let’s just talk about what you can find in those census records, 1790 to 1840. So you get only the name of the head of household, whether it was a male or female, then you get the free white males and various age groups, the free white females and various age groups. And then you have the number of slaves and they start listing them by gender and age, beginning in 1820s. If you’re doing African-American research, then you’re going to want to look at that and use that in conjunction with things like probate records and court records, to try to figure out where your ancestor could be and which of those enslaved people could be the ancestor.

Diana (11m 54s):
Another column that you may not have thought about appears in 1820 and 1830. And that’s the number of foreigners not naturalized. So if you have an immigrant ancestor and they’re marked in that column, that would give you a clue about when you should maybe look for naturalization records, which would be after that census. And then also in 1840, you get the name and age of a revolutionary war or military service pensioner. So that could be the war of 1812, or any of the other smaller military actions. So pay attention to some of those columns that you maybe haven’t looked at before.

Nicole (12m 34s):
Yeah, those 1840 revolutionary war pensioner names were good because I believe it included the name of the pensioner, even if he wasn’t the head of the household. So that’s always the bonus. Okay. Let’s talk about searching for your ancestor on the census. Some tips for finding them. We sometimes just type in the person’s name and then if we don’t see them, then we’re like, oh, guess they were, you know, not listed. But like I mentioned before, there’s a lot of variations on spelling for our ancestors surnames at times, especially when the indexer can tell what it said. So one idea is to just make a list of alternative spellings that you’ve seen on different records.

Nicole (13m 14s):
And then when you’re searching in the census records type in some of those alternative spellings or use wildcards to pick up different variants. So for Royston we can search for Boyton or different endings, like O N, E N, AN. Royston typically as R O Y S T O N, but maybe we could try R O I S T O N and then just putting all those different variations together. So there’s a lot of different options to look at. And what I like to do is kind of narrow it down by the county. So I’ll put it, I think they’re in this exact county and then try a bunch of different spellings or just wildcards.

Nicole (13m 54s):
So when I say wildcards, typically that means using an asterisk, which will match zero or more characters in that position. So it could be at the end of Royst*, and then that would catch Roysten -en and an -on and an -an or -in. And then you can put an asterisk at the beginning of Royston, so that if it’s a B or an R, it would pick up both of those. And then toward the end, you could just put it for the -on spot. And so you could have “*OYST*N” and then that would capture a lot of the different variations. And then when you’re still not finding the person you’re looking for, sometimes it helps to actually read the census pages. And when I’ve done that before I realized, oh, this is a really faded census, no wonder, I’m not finding my ancestor is probably illegible.

Nicole (14m 45s):
And so searching through the actual pages can help you find the person that you’re looking for when the indexer couldn’t read it at all times when you can’t read the handwriting, which is common, you can look at the different ways that the person makes each letter on the page, you know, looking at different names and different things that he wrote, you can kind of figure out, oh, the way that he writes his L’s and the way that he writes is Ss. And then you get familiar with what you’re kind of looking for, and that can help you decipher all kinds of handwriting, just getting familiar with the way that person writes. And we already mentioned this tip, but remember, to always look at the image, make sure you look for all the censuses for a person’s life, because this can really help you see the names that they went by.

Nicole (15m 31s):
Maybe sometimes they went by a middle name and you weren’t searching for that, or weren’t thinking about that. So gathering everything you can to really help you figure out where they lived and what names they went and buy and what was happening in their life can really help you find them on the census.

Diana (15m 49s):
Yes, those are all such great tips. We’re going to spend the next bit of this episode on a case study and showing how I used those pre-1850 censuses and records to support those, to answer a research question. And I probably talked about this case before, but this research question that I’ve had for many, many years was who was the father of Rachel Cox. Rachel was born about 1828 in Indiana and died between 1870 and 1880 in Falls county, Texas, and Rachel married Hickman Monroe Shults in July of 1848 in Navarro county, Texas.

Diana (16m 30s):
So like one of our typical women, Rachel’s records were only three censuses and that marriage record, that’s it, that named her there in Texas. And of course, none of those named a father for her. And there were several different Cox men in Navarro county at the time she got married, but there was one in particular that I settled on could be a possible father. And that was Benjamin Cox. And the reason I settled on him was I discovered a record in 1848, which was just a few weeks after her marriage. It was an August. She was married in July and her husband M Shults, Monroe Shults, he just goes by M in this record, is listed with Benjamin Cox.

Diana (17m 16s):
And they were both in this list of men who were commissioners appointed to work on a road there in Texas. And so I thought, well, they are associates. That means that they are in the same area. It would give a possible reason for Rachel and Monroe Shults to have met and married. So this became a good hypothesis for me to explore, but they got married in 1848. So that means all the records for Benjamin and Rachel would be before the 1850 census. So she’s not going to appear in his household. She was already married by 1850 and his household 1850, of course, doesn’t have her she’s in her husband’s household.

Nicole (17m 58s):
Yeah. Isn’t that kind of disappointing when you find, oh, shoot, they got married before 1850. So now I’m not going to see her on the census with her father. Dang it.

Diana (18m 12s):
And that happens a lot as we moved back in time.

Nicole (18m 16s):
Yeah. That was a close one. But even the 1850 census, doesn’t tell you if that’s your father or not, it’s still just an inference. So yeah, it’s okay. We can do it. It’s just a matter of building the case. So let’s talk about the research strategies for making the case like this. So we need to research all of the known records of an individual’s life for both of the individuals, both Rachel and Benjamin, and look for clues to pre-50 records really study the locations and learn about migration routes and boundary changes and records that were available that might name our ancestors and researched the FAN club and using all of these strategies will typically help you build a case that shows one person was more likely to be the parent or father than all the other candidates.

Diana (19m 12s):
So we always start with what we know and what I knew with Rachel Cox Shults was that marriage record and then the 1850 census and that’s it. So she’s still in Navarro county, Texas, but it gives me an estimated birth date in place for her, which is crucial. She was 21 in 1850. So that gave me a birth date of about 1829. And she was born in Indiana. Other censuses confirmed that, it was always about 1828, 1829 in Indiana. Well, when I looked at the 1850 census for Benjamin Cox, even though she wasn’t in that it was in a different county because he had moved to Travis county by then.

Diana (19m 55s):
But I did notice that there were two daughters in the family that were about Rachel’s age, who were also born in Indiana. And so that gave me a clue that this family had come from Indiana in the timeframe that Rachel would have been born. And so that gave me a really nice clue to start with the other thing that I noticed in 1850, because this is your jumping off point of going back in time. The first one to mention everyone in the household really pay attention to those places of birth of the children, because that can show a migration route.

Diana (20m 36s):
And in this family, we had Indiana and Arkansas, which gave me some clues. Also, this was a blended family and be really aware of this also that even though that might be the wife of the head of household, that might be a second or a third wife, and those children might be his and hers and theirs. So you always have to make sure you are using those pieces of information with those censuses, with a lot of other things. And in this one, it had two sons at the end of it, with the surname of Sutton. And those turned out to be Elizabeth, Benjamin’s second wife, her sons from a previous marriage. And so this was a family that was blended.

Diana (21m 18s):
So I didn’t know that until I started the research, but it’s always good to keep a really open mind.

Nicole (21m 24s):
Well, thank goodness. They were listed with a different surname because sometimes it’s really hard when they just all get the same surname as the head of household, even though they are, you know, the second wife’s children by her first husband. So it’s nice when they do list the other surname. Another tip for working with these pre 1850 census records is to use land records in conjunction with them. And many people are listed in the land records and this can help separate men have the same name. And oftentimes you’ll notice certain people in the land record with the same surname that you can maybe infer that these are relatives.

Nicole (22m 4s):
And so those people on the land records could really help you sort out the people of the same name and make little groups of associates and relatives and people who live next to them and figure out who’s who land records can also indicate migration into or out of an area. So if you are wondering when your person arrived and you’re not sure which one is, which the land records can help you with that because they can tell you who’s lived there for a long time or who newly arrived in 1848. So with the case of Benjamin Cox, that would be really useful to figure out when he arrived in Texas and the various counties where he was living and figure out where he was at certain times, with my example earlier of George Harrison Tharp, where I found him in two different counties on the census record in 1840, I looked at the land records and found that he owned land in Henry county, Kentucky, which was split into two counties in 1838 when Carroll county was created.

Nicole (23m 6s):
So that really helped me with my hypothesis that this was the same man, but he had land in both places.

Diana (23m 13s):
Well, and that reminds me of another thing to consider with the land. As the new lands opened up, a lot of men were land speculators. They had no intention of actually settling on the land and you can see some that are patenting land all over the place. And then the intention was to sell that land and make their fortunes. So that can also be something to keep in mind. If you have an ancestor that seems to have a lot of different land grants or land patents in their area with Benjamin Cox, he did get an original Texas land grant. And it notes in that land file in Texas, they have an entire file for them, and it was 17 pages and it had the certificate, the notes, the appraisal for the survey, a sketch of the land gets a lot of information about him talking about how he patented this land in Navarro county and in Hale county, and that he was a resident of Belle county.

Diana (24m 9s):
So it explained a lot of his different moves and locations on censuses from 1850 on, but then it also gives the great clue that he was a Mercer colonist. And when I researched Mercer colonists, I found that the first settlers came from Arkansas in 1845. So if you remember from that 1850 Census, there were some children born in Arkansas. So that points to another location and sure enough, doing some research in the 1840 census located Benjamin Cox in Izard county, Arkansas. And this entry is really interesting because it says Benjamin Cox and alias.

Diana (24m 53s):
So what do you think alias meant Nicole,

Nicole (24m 58s):
Another name that he went by?

Diana (25m 1s):
Well, when I looked at all the different entries in that census record, it was found on several of the men’s the head of household. It would say so-and-so and alias so-and-so and alias. And so putting that together with the knowledge that this was a blended household, the Benjamin Cox and the Suttons were on the 1850 census. I hypothesized that this just meant he had married Elizabeth Sutton and that we had Suttons in the household as well as Cox’s, because that seemed to be what the census taker was using to indicate a blended household. So I thought that was really an interesting clue. And I had to put that together with additional research, you know, right off the bat.

Diana (25m 44s):
I really didn’t have an idea about what that could mean.

Nicole (25m 48s):
Never seen that before, but that is a really great example of using the 1850 census on the children’s birth places to figure out the migration path and go back and find where he was living in 1840. Right. Did you find other people of the same name in Arkansas?

Diana (26m 7s):
Well, I found the Cox family and then as I continued to research on Benjamin, I found that his adult children had followed him from Indiana into Arkansas. And so some of the daughters, he only had one son. He had all daughters after that. So I didn’t realize they were family members at first, but once I figured out who the girls had married, then I found the families all there. And that’s another thing. The, oftentimes when we’re looking at those census records, we don’t realize that the person right next door is a daughter or a sister because they’ve married and they have a different surname.

Diana (26m 47s):
So that’s why we returned to these records over and over the more knowledge we have with the family, the more we’ll understand that grouping of people there in the census.

Nicole (26m 56s):
Wow. That’s interesting. I just did an experiment and I typed in 1840 census Ancestry, which is how I always get to the right census. I want to search and I typed in Benjamin Cox with Arkansas, and he’s the only one there in Arkansas with that name. But they have put his name as C O H instead of Cox.

Diana (27m 17s):
Yep. That’s a good example of that indexing,

Nicole (27m 20s):
The great things the Ancestry does is they allow users to add an alternate name, which is, I think some of the time why we can find people in the search when we type in Benjamin Cox. And it says Benjamin COA, because someone had already added that it was Cox. Yeah. As an alternate name, which I’m so glad people do that. But yeah, looking at this image, it is kind of a fuzzy one and the ink is kind of thick. And so it makes it hard to like pick out individual letters. So I’m not surprised, but I do see all these alias things. That’s really weird.

Diana (27m 56s):
I love it though, because that gives you such a good clue that all of these families are blended families, and it would be fun to do a little study of that county and discover all those connections. I’m surmising, that, that they were all blended families just because I know Benjamin’s was. Huh. But it would be fun to prove that

Nicole (28m 15s):
That’s a good guess. At least, you know, it could mean the other people in the household go by a different surname. Right. True. Yep. Which is what alias means, like The thing or otherwise known as something else. Right. It doesn’t look like Coa when, you know, you’re looking for Cox, but it’s illegible because the ink was thick and the images blurry. So can barely even tell it’s Benjamin surprisingly, they got that. All right. Well, let’s talk about another tip for helping you sort out, all the information you’re finding when you’re looking at all these different census records and land records, it’s helpful to create a timeline. And when we teach our Research Like a Pro method, we put that right at the beginning.

Nicole (28m 58s):
And then as we find more records, we like to go back and update the timeline so that it can be a tool that we use throughout the research project. One of the reasons this helps is it helps you separate men have the same name. And if you know that there’s a man living in a different county at the same time as your man is living in the county where you think he is, that can help you say that guy is not the right one. And I know that because I have a separate timeline for him, and then you can kind of differentiate them based on the timelines. And then it also helps you when you can track their migration. You know, when you’re first getting started, you may not know where your ancestor moved to or from. And so you will probably need to create a rough timeline of the things, you know, and then from there, you can fill in the blanks as you research and as the timeline gets filled out, then you have built more of a case for the identity of your ancestor,

Diana (29m 53s):
Right? That timeline is so important, especially when they migrate and they have large families and have so many things going on. And with Benjamin Cox, I felt really good about the 1840 census because I had a marriage record to Elizabeth. And he’s mentioned with Elizabeth with 1850 census that all fit together. But what I wasn’t so sure about was before the 1840 census and that marriage and finding him back in Indiana and Ohio. Now, I knew there was an Indiana location from the census in 1850, where it listed some birthplaces of the daughters in Indiana. And I also knew about an Ohio connection because his records of his life give his birth in Ohio and also I have a marriage for him in Ohio.

Diana (30m 41s):
And I believe that the marriage to Kasiah Barbie popped up as a hint. It was something other people had attached to him. And as I did further research that really did settle into place. Love his daughters, named daughters Kasiah and began to use that fan club, the Barbies, Kasiah’s brothers or uncles moved in conjunction with Benjamin Cox. I couldn’t figure that out though until I did a real study of the census. And so how I did that was I used my research log. And as you can imagine, there were a lot of Benjamin Cox’s, maybe not in Arkansas where you were looking, but in Ohio and in Indiana, so many men have the same name.

Diana (31m 27s):
So I had a page on my research log just for the 1820 census and all the hits for Benjamin Cox in the different counties in Indiana and Ohio. And then the same for the 1830 census. It was really interesting because I was able to rule different men out because they stayed in one place from 1820 to 1850 and I could say, okay, this is not my Ben Cox. So I gradually came down to just two possibilities and because of the FAN club, because of the Barbies, I was able to discover that Ben Cox had moved in 1820 to Flat Rock, Delaware county, Indiana, because Daniel and Olive Barbie were also in that county.

Diana (32m 11s):
And the FAN club is so important in this pre-1850 research, trying to find people that all came together as groups from one place to another, that really can help you figure out where your ancestors going. But then you have to also see if those tick marks in those early census records fit the family. And so I had Benjamin of course, in a different location for both 1820 and 1830 censuses in 1820 he’s in Delaware county in 1830s and Monroe county, but in both the family members fit. And the one I was really interested in was 1830, because remember, I’m looking for my Rachel Cox and she would have been born about 1828, 1829.

Diana (32m 57s):
And there was a female under five on the 1830 census that would fit for Rachel. And as I continued to research this family, I would put the names of the children into the appropriate place and see if they fit. So I had to just continue fitting together this family, as I’ve found the right census records. And then of course, boundary changes that Flat Rock area, the Delaware new purchase, when I mapped that out, looked at the boundary changes I realized it fit in with tax records and land records for Benjamin. So it was a tricky project.

Diana (33m 38s):
It took several phases of research projects actually to get to this point of being able to show that Benjamin and Rachel Cox were indeed father and daughter. And, you know, the final thing that proved it was DNA because I had so many DNA connections through all of Benjamin Cox’s, other children to descendants of Rachel Cox, me and then two other cousins. So it was a fun project, took several years to do, but I feel really secure in saying now that Ben is the father of Rachel Cox through all of the documentary research and then with the additional proof of DNA,

Nicole (34m 16s):
Fantastic. That’s such a good case study of using pre-1850 census records to figure out if this person could be the father of Rachel. So good job. And it’s great to be able to add Benjamin Cox to our tree. And I really like when you found on the 1830 census being able to fit Rachel into this family, you know, there’s only one daughter under five years old and it had to have been Rachel because the other daughters, Minerva and Sarah, and looking at were in the other categories, you know, five through nine and two daughters that were 10 to 14. And I believe those ones were actually listed on the 1850 census. So correlating the names of the children with the 1850 census was pretty great, right?

Diana (34m 59s):
It was, and I had to do a little mini separate projects on each one of those daughters, figuring out their marriages and their migration, and then putting them in the context of the family as well. So I really researched this entire family, all the children figuring out where they all went, because that’s what you have to do when you’re trying to put together a family pre-1850, and the censuses are such great clues. They lead you to other records. They help you correlate the families. There’s so much you can do with them. So I really hope everybody listening. If you’ve been putting off any of that research, that’s difficult before 1850, hopefully you picked up some tips and using a complete research process.

Diana (35m 43s):
Like we teach with Research Like a Pro really helps you to do this kind of research. I could not have done it without my research logs and timelines and reports. The entire process.

Nicole (35m 54s):
Absolutely. You mentioned doing several different projects and writing up reports for all of them. So writing kind of, as you go, as you figure things out really helps you put everything together. So great job. And thanks for listening everybody. And we will talk to you again next week.

Diana (36m 10s):
All right. Bye bye everyone. Bye.

Nicole (36m 48s):
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.