RLP 177: RLPDNA Study Group 6 – Research Planning

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 177 RLP with DNA Study Group 6 – 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, The Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (43s):
Let’s go, hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (49s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (50s):
I’m doing great diana, how are you doing? What have you been reading?

Diana (54s):
I have been reading my NGS magazine when you are a member of the national genealogy society, you get a magazine that comes quarterly and they always have really interesting articles and they tend to be by a theme. And so this issue is for the fall months, October to December, and the theme is the census. So the article I’m reading is all about the 1950 census and talking about what’s going to be in that. So we’re all excited for the release of that. And that’s going to be April 1st, 2022, which is coming fast.

Nicole (1m 31s):
Oh, it’s 72 years,

Diana (1m 33s):
72 years.

Nicole (1m 34s):
Oh. I was telling somebody the other day, the census is, are restricted for 70 or something years. And I knew that the 1950 census is coming out soon. And I was like, maybe it’s 75 years. It’s funny that I’m 72, it’s kind of a random.

Diana (1m 49s):
So the article actually tells a little bit about the 72 year rule. So here’s the backstory on it. The national archives was established in 1935 and when they first took all the censuses from 1870 and earlier, and transferred them to the national archives in 1940, they made them all available for researchers. And so one thing we have to remember, so those early censuses were taken without any confidentiality or privacy expectations. And if you learned a little bit about those, they were actually supposed to be put on the county courthouse in 1870 for public inspection and correction, right. Everybody would know your business, but the 1880 census wasn’t released until 1952.

Diana (2m 35s):
And at that point they were having a conversation about this issue of privacy. And so they decided on that 72 year lapse. So, you know, from the enumeration date to 72 years is when they would go ahead and publish those or make those available for people to go search. And then that became a law, technically a law in 1978. So now one thing to know is that when it comes out, of course it won’t be index. That’s going to take a few months, but we can start searching if we know the address of our people, because we’ll be able to search numeration districts. So you might want to start thinking of your families trying to track down or ask them if they’re still alive, or were you living at 1950?

Nicole (3m 20s):
Well, that’s kind of a fun thing to look forward to. And I always enjoy participating in the indexing efforts. I remember the 1940 census was really fun to help out with.

Diana (3m 31s):
Yeah. And I actually have a meeting with family search, a group of genealogists that get to meet with family search and see the latest and greatest. And that is one of our topics is the 1950 census though. Hopefully I can report next podcast about what I learned and how that indexing effort will go. I’m sure they’re going to have a huge effort to get everyone to index. So I agree. It’s kind of a fun thing to be part of a really big effort like that. So if we all just index something, it’ll go so much faster. Absolutely.

Nicole (4m 4s):
I remember it went a lot faster with the 1940 census than people thought it would. Yeah.

Diana (4m 9s):
What would have you been working on? I’ve

Nicole (4m 12s):
Been making a lot of network graphs. I’ve been working with one particular person’s DNA who had severe and DOGAMI they’re from New Mexico and most of their grandparents were from that same place in New Mexico. And so it was actually pretty much impossible to download all of the matches and in common with, or shared matches from ancestry for this person, because there were so many shared match connections between this endogamous group that all enter married in New Mexico that, you know, it just took days and days to just even download all the matches from 100 down to 40 centimorgans that I finally just gave up on it. And I made a network graph with what I had already gathered, which was about a hundred to 70.

Nicole (4m 57s):
They didn’t separate into groups. Really. It was just one big network that all were connected to each other

Diana (5m 3s):
That is kind of the problem with endogamy and that’s why you have to approach it in a different way than we generally do with our clustering.

Nicole (5m 12s):
It was quite interesting. So for announcements, we have the study group will begin next on February 16th and that’s our Research Like a Pro with DNA and registration for that begins in December. And then next fall we’ll have the Research Like a Pro study group. Let us know if you want to be a peer group leader and ask us any of your questions. All right. So today we’re talking about Diana’s research project to discover Cynthia Dillard’s father using DNA and documentary evidence. So she has been working on learning about the tools, and then now she is going to tell us about how she created a research plan,

Diana (5m 53s):
Right? And it’s so fun to do a research plan. We do a lot of steps leading up to that. So I’ve already written about assessing DNA matches, getting them organized, doing the timeline, analyzing the sources, writing citations, looking locality and ethnicity, and exploring the tools. So that’s a lot of steps. And now I’m finally in this part talking about making a plan. And before I started the research, like a pro process, before I figured it out that you need to plan, I never made a research plan. I would sure I would write down a few books or microphones. I wanted to look out when I went to the family history library, but I didn’t really think through all the different things that I needed to, to make a plan.

Diana (6m 38s):
That’s, what’s so fun about the processes that you actually do. A lot of thinking, just to review a little bit, I’m using the DNA matches of my second cousin twice removed Victor Parker, and he received more DNA from Cynthia Dillard, previous phases I’ve talked and written about so much. Everybody knows Cynthia, but I have pretty much eliminated Diller candidates in Georgia that I could find through censuses for her. And so I’ve just turned to DNA and I found this cluster of matches that go to any light to Dillard. And I’m hypothesizing that they’re brother and sister looking at their birth dates, they’re very similar 1814 for Elijah And Cynthia, about the same, about 1816, both of those are a little fuzzy on the years that they are supposedly both born in Georgia and then their lives take place in Alabama.

Diana (7m 30s):
So I have got my objective and I know what I want to do. I’ve got my DNA cluster. And so now it’s time to do a plan.

Nicole (7m 39s):
So by this point of the Research Like a Pro DNA process, we usually have a pretty solid foundation for the project and have reviewed the DNA. We’ve reviewed the documents. And now we just need a plan for the next steps that will guide the research phase. So in the research plan, there’s kind of four things to do. You review and summarize the known facts that known information helps you and guides you to form a hypothesis and then figure out which sources you can use to test that hypothesis and find evidence that will either support that hypothesis or reject it. So first to summarize those known facts, then you start writing down your hypothesis, which is flexible, and you probably will update it as you go along.

Nicole (8m 22s):
Then you brainstorm a list of sources. You identify all the different sources that might be relevant, then you prioritize which sources you want to do first. And usually that’s just a very limited number because you don’t want to plan too much. And then you find the answer in the first couple of steps, so that time would have been wasted. So you just really focus on like the best things that you can do, you know, maybe four or five things. And with the Research Like a Pro with DNA course, we always talk about doing two or three documentary research steps and then, or three DNA tools or methods that could help you. Then if you finish those and you want to keep going, you have your list of identified sources to draw upon and to continue,

Diana (9m 6s):
Right. It’s kind of fun because sometimes you think a research plan is just a matter of writing down four things to do, right? But those are little steps before that, that helped you get to that point. So the first thing you have to do is to do a summary of known facts. And I did this for the documentary evidence. I had done my timeline for Elijah and I talked about that in the last podcast. So some people wonder why you can’t just use our timeline, you know, for your summary of known facts. And while you do, you use that as your basis. But I like to take that timeline and then just create a table in my project document for the most relevant things. Sometimes our timeline has a lot of information.

Diana (9m 47s):
If that maybe it’s not really relevant to what we doing for our objective. And so I like to take out the things that I think are going to be most helpful. And I just have two columns in my summary for known facts. I have one column for the date and the locality of the event, kind of a description of the event and then a column for the source citation. And my source citations were already done in the timeline. So it’s so easy to copy and paste those in. So just to kind of give a brief picture of Elijah’s life, this is what I have in my summary of known facts. I’ve got that he was in 1848, a resident of Macon county, Alabama.

Diana (10m 28s):
And I know that because I looked at the image of his land patent. So if you find on the bureau of land management website, their general land office records, a land patent, make sure you look at the image, those are available for free. It’s a free website. And it had said on there that the localities were Macon/Lee county. So I was so curious about that. And the reason they did that on the index was because he’s a resident of Macon, but the land patent was in Lee county. So I learned some information there about where he was living in 1848, which was great because I haven’t found him on the 1850 census.

Diana (11m 9s):
So that’s the earliest record I’ve have of him. And then in 1852, he has another land patent this time in Russell county. But this time he’s a resident of Barbara county. So now I have another county in 1854. He has a land patent in Dale county and he’s also a resident there. He gets married in 1855 and he’s in another county pike county. So already we have got him in four different counties within seven years. So that’s kind of crazy. Wow,

Nicole (11m 39s):
It’s crazy. It’s just interesting that he’s going all around in Alabama.

Diana (11m 45s):
Yes it is. Which does not make my research very easy because there’s so many places to look for him in 1860. He finally settles down a bit and he is in the same place. He got married in pike county. He enlists for the civil war in 1863, also in pike county in 1870. He is on the census and Barbara county. So he’s come home I guess, from the war and settled there. But then by 1880 he’s back in pike county, and that’s where he dies. So that was, it was pretty fun to find all those sources. And most of those were on ancestry. They came through as hints.

Diana (12m 25s):
And then I did a little bit more work on the land records just because I had never researched him before. You know, if you’re starting with somebody you’ve been researching for years, you’ve got all this stuff right. To put in your timeline. But I, I had never even heard or researched. They lied to at all till I discovered him in through the DNA. So now I’ve got my nice little summary of known facts. So when I find a record, I can compare it and see if it matches up.

Nicole (12m 49s):
So did Cynthia live in Alabama ever?

Diana (12m 52s):
Oh yeah. All the records I have for her are in Alabama and then one out in Texas. So even though all of her census records say she was born in Georgia, I have no actual record of her in Georgia. She is first listed by name on the 1850 census and chambers county, Alabama, which is a little bit north of where Elijah was living, not too far, but just a few counties north. So they were never in the same place at The same time.

Nicole (13m 19s):
So I did want to point out that she lived most of her life in Alabama because you know, her birth was in Georgia and her death was in Texas, but then kind of the in-between, she was all in Alabama, just like Elijah.

Diana (13m 33s):
Absolutely.

Nicole (13m 33s):
So they do have that in common and they both were supposedly born in Georgia.

Diana (13m 38s):
And I think she was there as early as 1834, because I do have the land patent application of her husband for DeKalb county, which is a little bit more in Northern part of the state. And it says that he has been living there with his wife and children for three years. So that does place them in Alabama pretty early in the mid 1830s. And the children are all born there. So I don’t know when she moved into Alabama, but it was fairly early, same as Elijah.

Nicole (14m 9s):
All right. Well, that’s a good summary of what you know about Elijah so far. And so next is when you create your hypothesis and this is where you combine what you know about Elijah with what you think the records will show about him as far as our relationship to Cynthia Dillard. So tell us what you wrote for your hypothesis.

Diana (14m 36s):
Okay. I really like writing the hypothesis. This is where I get to put all my thoughts into words. So I wrote according to the 1860, 1870 and 1880 census records Elijah Dillard was born about 1815 or 1816 in Georgia. Cynthia Dillard Royston born about 1814, also in Georgia would be his contemporary and likely a sister based on the DNA evidence from the Gephi network graph, both Elijah and Cynthia have Georgia listed as their father’s birthplace in the 1880 census. Their Dillard father would have been born before 1795 and could have moved to Alabama anytime after it became a territory in 1817.

Diana (15m 22s):
Researching additional records for Elijah Dillard, could identify a possible family group to connect him to his and Cynthia’s birth family. The unknown Dillard father may not have moved to Alabama and his children may have independently moved from Georgia to Alabama in their adult years.

Nicole (15m 38s):
That’s a great hypothesis. And I think, you know, it’s really helpful to hear an example of one because sometimes people don’t know what to write for that, especially when they don’t really know, you know, who the father will be in. Of course it’s an unknown father, but you just put that into words, just like you did the unknown Dillard father, maybe didn’t move to Alabama. He just maybe stayed in Georgia and there’s a lot of maybes and we don’t know, but it’s a hypothesis, so that’s fine.

Diana (16m 6s):
That’s right. And you have to broaden your mind a little bit. If you’re not finding a person, an ancestor, maybe there’s a reason maybe your have been put in this little box and you have to think outside that box to think of another possibility and the hypothesis helps you to do that. It does.

Nicole (16m 23s):
So the next step is to brainstorm your list of sources, to identify sources that can help you reach your objective. So using your hypothesis and your summary of known facts, you just make a list of all possible collections and records and DNA tools that can be used or searched to help you find the answer. So you can look at your locality guide, you can think about the tools you use to explore, and then you can put down the ones that you think will help you for this particular case.

Diana (16m 53s):
Right? So with all of those different counties in Alabama, I had to choose at least a couple, right, because there were so many. So I decided to do locality guides for Macon, where Elijah was first identified as a resident and then pike, where he lived out his later years and did locality guides for those two localities. And so then I went back to my guides to make my lists of sources. And because I have in my summary of known facts when he was living there, I knew I just needed to get some possible records from Macon county before 1860 and then for pike county from 1850 to 1900. So that was really helpful for me to point out exactly the years that I’m looking for him in that specific place.

Diana (17m 41s):
And then I was able to make a list from my locality guide of records that were possibilities. You know, I, I put things like the Alabama state census voter registration, newspapers, probate records, land records, marriage records, local histories, Bible records. I had a nice long list. That’s great.

Nicole (18m 4s):
It’s good to think about, you know, doing reasonably exhaustive research and thinking of all the different types of records that could contain information, that would be helpful. And I was also thinking about how helpful it is to have your timeline since this guy moved around so much and to be able to say, I’m looking in this county for this range of years and how many times have we done research where we’re just searching in, in counties? And then we realized, oh, they didn’t even live there in that time. You know, why am I wasting my time looking at this?

Diana (18m 37s):
It’s good

Nicole (18m 38s):
To, to really focus in on that timeframe and place where, you know, they lived.

Diana (18m 45s):
Absolutely. So I also needed to do some DNA tools. And so we had our DNA tools, lesson tactile about pedigree, triangulation tools, as well as segment tools. And so I use the DNA tools, bell curve that Robyn created, which I love for research planning. It made it so easy. I just looked at that and I thought, okay, well, I could try this tool from genetic affairs and another tool from DNA GEDCom and then a couple of things on MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA and GEDMatch. It just gave me some ideas of things that I could pull from for my possible lists. And so that was great. I didn’t put everything in there because I, I was really thinking about what would be best for this project, but it was really helpful because sometimes, you know, with DNA tools, you think, well, I don’t know, what should I use?

Diana (19m 36s):
What should I do? So having that bell curve chart could go right through it and pick out the ones that I thought could be useful.

Nicole (19m 44s):
It’s a helpful chart that Robin made to think about which DNA tools are the most helpful at the beginning of a project versus those that are longer term, more time intensive tools. Yeah. So next you have to prioritize your sources, put them in order of what you’ll do first, your first couple of searches will be the ones where you are more confident that that will have something helpful for you. What did you do?

Diana (20m 12s):
I just know from researching in the south, that you’re going to find your people more likely in things like the probate land or court records. So I prioritize those records for Macon county, which would be the eight pre 1850 time period. And then for pike county, I decided I wanted to look for his death record and look at some county histories. So number one was to search the probate records of Macon county, Alabama, for any Dillard connections. And there were two collections that were broad probate collections on family, search someone on ancestry.

Diana (20m 52s):
And then I wanted to number two, search the land records of Macon county. And again, those were on family search. It was the digitized collection of the deeds, and it has a general index, which is always what I’m looking for. And then I decided number three, to look at county histories for pike county, since that’s where Elijah lived for the last 40 years of his life, helping to understand that county a bit more and then to search for a death record for Elijah, there was microfilm that was called pike county, Alabama birth, 1881 to 1937 and deaths 1881 to 1921.

Diana (21m 32s):
So I thought, well, maybe he’s mentioned in a death record, that’d be interesting. And then number five, I put to search the court records of Macon county. So I put that down a bit because court records were not indexed. And even though it’s likely he could be in those, they’d be more time-consuming. So I decided I would do everything else first and then take a look at the court records, see if I could find anything there. So I will often do that, even though there’s a record that might really give me the answer. If it’s going to take a really long time to research, I will do that later on in the plan, just in case something comes up, that’s easier first.

Nicole (22m 14s):
Absolutely. And I think if you were able to find the answer in the probate and land records, which are indexed, but you had prioritized them after the court records, you would have spent all that time looking in the court records, then maybe not have found anything. You know, you really have to kind of think about both of those ease of access and the likelihood of finding the answer to your research question,

Diana (22m 38s):
Right? Because sometimes you can go through the easier sources quickly and you can say, okay, looked at all those looked at that index. No, no, no, no, no. And then you can know that you’ve searched those and then get into the margin time-consuming searches.

Nicole (22m 52s):
Yeah. And I’m just thinking about like, what is your actual research question with Elijah? Because usually you’re like looking for a person’s parents, right. And for you, you’re looking for any kind of connection, a sibling type connection, which a sibling connection is hard to prove usually. So any kind of clues that could show any kind of association between Cynthia Dillard Royston and her husband, Thomas Royston and Elijah Dillard, does that kind of what you’re thinking?

Diana (23m 21s):
Well, the DNA really shows that connection clearly. And so actually with the records, that would be lovely and fabulous, but I really wasn’t expecting to do that. What I was really doing my objective is to try to find the father of Elijah, because then I could look for evidence that he was also, the father sent the, because that DNA connection has coming somewhere. Maybe they didn’t have the same father. Maybe they had the same mother, I don’t know, but I know there’s a connection. So my, my objective was just to try to find more about Elijah and to hopefully find Dillard connections to him.

Nicole (23m 55s):
Yeah. You’re kind of working to identify who he was, where he lived and then maybe you can extend his pedigree back in time to see if any of his progenitors could have been Cynthia’s progenitors. Right. And that brings us to the DNA tools. So what did you want to do with your DNA tools this time for your research plan?

Diana (24m 16s):
Well, I have this network graph, so, you know, people are so a little bit clueless about what that is. A network graph is just a visualization at the DNA matches and, and you have clusters that they all relate to each other. So there’s a common ancestor to be found for each of these clusters. And then you also have connections to other clusters. So you might have a cluster. Like for instance, I have a, quite a large cluster of all the people that are descendants of Cynthia Dillard and Thomas Royston, but then offshoots of those are clusters for like a cluster of, one of her children. A bunch of their descendants have tested and they’re their own little cluster.

Diana (24m 56s):
And then this Dillard connection was coming off of that offshoot of Cynthia and Thomas’s big cluster. So looking at that, I found the common ancestor of that cluster was Elijah Dillard, but only three people had trees. They were really good trees and they were all independent of each other. Then I decided that one of the things I could do for the DNA was to continue building out some partial trees and finding their connection as well, to relight, to Diller, just to shore up that evidence. And then I thought I could use the family search descendancy tree for Elijah Diller because he’s on FamilySearch and people put a lot of his descendants there and I can go out to four generations of his descendancy and I can see all the surnames that are coming down through his descendancy.

Diana (25m 40s):
And I could compare those surnames to some of the trees as I build them out. And I could use G works, which looks at trees and lets you look at surnames. So I just had those three things to build out the trees, use family search descendancy tree and then use G works so that I could just identify more of those people in the peach cluster.

Nicole (26m 2s):
That’s great. You know, the more people that you can find in a genetic network that go back to a similar set of people like these, Dillard’s the stronger your evidence becomes. And possibly there could be another sibling of Elijah and Cynthia, if they really were siblings, another, there could be another sibling and they’re hiding whose descendants just don’t have a tree. So that’ll be interesting.

Diana (26m 26s):
Right. And you know, I recognize that this is a time consuming part of the research building out trees. It’s always time-consuming. So I may not get as much done on it as I would like, but of course I can always do that for future research. I am really excited, work my plan and see what I can find. I just feel like I finally have something that I can do with Cynthia. And you know, I was kind of feeling a little bit at a loss of knowing what else can I look for for her family? So using DNA has been great to give me another avenue to research.

Nicole (27m 4s):
That’s a really good point that often DNA won’t give us the answer that far back, because there’s a lot of potential relationships that you could have with these people who descend from a light Dillard, the amount of DNA. Isn’t going to tell you what your relationship and who your common ancestor is, but it does give you a clue and using the clues that the DNA points toward can help us then put together a body of evidence that will allow us to come to a conclusion about a biological relationship in our family tree. So that’s exciting. And I’m excited to see what you share next week. When we talk about how your research meant

Diana (27m 38s):
Me too. I’m very excited to talk about that. I think that the research phase is of course our favorites because we love seeing what’s in the records and sometimes we have a bunch of negatives. Sometimes we have to take those negatives and figure out what that means. So it’s always fun to talk about the research. So look forward to that next time.

Nicole (27m 57s):
All right, everybody have a great week and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye

Diana (28m 3s):
Bye-bye.

Nicole (28m 1s):
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 e-course 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.