RLP 184: Revisiting Research Objectives Again

Nicole (1s):
This is a Research Like a Pro episode 184 Revisiting Objectives again. 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.

Nicole (42s):
Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Hi everyone, and welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (43s):
Hi, Nicole, and hi to all of our listeners. We are excited to share with you the Research Like a Pro steps. We are revisiting those because we know that there are a lot of you that have joined us since we first recorded these. So we are resharing episodes 113 to 119 that we did in the fall of 2020. And we had a brainstorming session and decided it would be fun at the beginning of each new year to revisit the steps. And next year we’ll probably do the Research Like a Pro with DNA steps. So we can go back and forth and give you a chance to listen to the whole process again, and decide where you’re at in your progress.

Nicole (1m 28s):
Yeah, we thought we would just do like an intro to each episode before we replay it for you and then kind of a wrap-up at the end of each episode, so that we can share any new insights that we have to the process and any new updates to the tools we’re using.

Diana (1m 41s):
The first episode, this is episode 113, that will be replaying and it was all about objectives. So you’ll see in this series that we use my case study of discovering more about the life of my second great-grandmother Nancy Briscoe. And I had done this project as part of a 14 day mini challenge, where we were supposed to research this for 30 minutes a day, doing one of the tasks from the Research Like a Pro process. And it was really fun to work through a little project. So you’ll be seeing that we kind of carry that case study through each episode, and I recorded a webinar that goes through the entire process, all based on this case study.

Diana (2m 28s):
And so we’ll put in the show notes to link to that blog post, where you can watch the video. So if you want to see pictures and hear me talk about it all in one fell swoop, you can do that. So in this episode on objectives, we discussed the difference between a research question and a research objective. And we talk a little bit about phases of research, and we’ll come back at the end of this episode and give you some of our thoughts and comments now on research questions and objectives.

Nicole (3m 2s):
All right, enjoy the episode and we’ll see you at the end. Hi everyone. And welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer and I’m here with my mother accredited genealogist, Diana elder. Hi Diana.

Diana (3m 13s):
Hi, Nicole.

Nicole (3m 13s):
Let’s start with just talking about an objective and really defining it. So what is an objective when Diana and I were discussing this before the podcast, we kind of came up with this idea of an objective, being a little different from a research question. So in genealogy standards and in mastering genealogical proof, a research question is defined as a question that asks about identity, relationship events or situations. And so a research question that answers one of those types of questions, and that is broad enough that you can actually find the answer to the question, but also focused enough that the question will yield an answer that can be checked against the genealogical proof standard to see if it meets that standard.

Nicole (4m 9s):
And so typically the product of a research question that Tom Jones talks about in his book, Mastering Genealogical Proof, the product will be a proof argument and that can be checked against the GPS. And so that might be slightly different than what an objective is. Tell us more about kind of the difference we’re making between a research question and an objective.

Diana (4m 34s):
Sure. So I was first introduced to objectives when I did my accreditation through, ICAPGEN, or the International Commission for the Accreditation of Professional Genealogists. And I was taught about objectives because that was key in our four generation project. We had to have an objective for each generation, as well as an overarching objective. And then it’s also as part of the testing when you do a final project and you’re given four hours to do a complete research project. And this is really key in our client work, where we have to set a specific objective for however many hours the client has hired us for.

Diana (5m 18s):
And so with accreditation, it kind of is a mirror of client work, and you want to make sure that, you know, specifically what you are searching for. And so an objective is written out and place at the beginning of your document on your computer screen at something to keep you focused. And it’s very, very helpful when you’re just doing research on anything. So the culmination of an objective is generally a research report. It’s guiding you in a specific research project and you’ll end up with a research report. And then sometimes it takes several of those reports to actually come to genealogical proof where you could actually write a proof argument.

Nicole (6m 6s):
Perfect. Thank you. I really like this distinction between a research question that leads to a proof argument versus an objective that leads to a research report because often a research report will just be a certain phase of the research that we are trying to work on. Maybe a guiding question. That’s a supporting question to our overarching question. So a research report doesn’t always mean that we’ve finished or proven our question where it’s just kind of finishing up that phase of the research in mastering genealogical proof Jones talks about how, if we have a question that is too broad, then it allows too many correct answers that can’t be tested by the genealogical proof standard.

Nicole (6m 51s):
And then if our question is too narrow and too specific, you know, we want an exact date of something that might be unanswerable because the records of the place and the time that are available may not have that exact answer that we’re looking for. So he gives some really good guidance for how to make a good question that will lead to approve argument. Some of the guidance that he gives, he said in lectures and stuff that we should not have a yes or no question for our research question. However, with an objective, when we’re just trying to write a report for a certain phase of the research, we’ll often have a yes or no question. We just have to think of our broad question, our overarching question, maybe as who are the parents of so-and-so, but we’ll have multiple phases of research where we identify, you know, the vital events, if that person and each one of those can be its own research report with an objective.

Nicole (7m 41s):
And we might have a hypothesis for who the parents are. And we could say, are so-and-so the parents of this person. And that could be our objective for another phase of the research, which will result in a research report. And then after we gather all of this information and we finally settle on who the parents are, we can use what we’ve written in our reports to create a proof argument for who the parents are. So I think it’s really helpful to think about objectives as what goes along with a report and then a research question as what goes along with a proof argument. So hopefully that helps us kind of understand what we’re doing and in research like a pro we’re really teaching you and talking about these reports and these small phases of research.

Nicole (8m 25s):
So when you make your objective, it’s okay to focus on a smaller supporting question that might lead to an overarching research question later. Like just maybe one biographical detail that you want to learn about like the birth or the death of somebody breaking it down into these manageable phases with a specific objective for your research will really help you to make more progress. Like we always talk about in research like a pro and it will help you to not get bogged down. And your overarching question of something difficult to prove that’s going to require a lot of indirect evidence can really help you make progress on finding out the things that you need to find.

Diana (9m 2s):
Right? I think so many times we have these really big ideas. We want to break through this brick wall, which is great. We always want to break down those brick walls and discover the parents of an ancestor, or we want to learn everything we can about an ancestor’s life and write a big book or a big history. And those are great, but those all have to start with something a little bit smaller. And that’s where those phases that become several different research reports. Each with a little different objective can really help us to get to that and fig product.

Nicole (9m 39s):
Absolutely. And this is really important with DNA research, because if we try to do everything all at once the traditional research, the DNA analysis, we will quickly get bogged down. So with DNA research, it’s good to start off with doing a phase of documentary research, then a phase of looking at the DNA evidence and seeing what it points to. And then once you come up with some different hypotheses, you can test each of those by asking a yes or no objective question, and then either eliminating those hypotheses or finding out that that one was a yes. So breaking down your research when you’re doing a DNA project will be really helpful and having smaller objectives with reports attached when you are writing your objective, it’s important to include specific details about the person or research subject.

Nicole (10m 32s):
So you might want to include their vital information, their birth, death, marriage dates, and their spouse. But sometimes we get the question, what do you do if you don’t have any of those details, maybe you only have them listed on a census. It’s okay to estimate. So if you have them on a census, you have an estimate of their birth year and their place of birth. And you can also put their residents at a certain date. So you don’t need to like spell out that the sentence they were in. So-and-so you just say, and who resided in bell county, Texas in 1880, something like that. And it just puts that person in a place in time. And that’s really helpful when you are first starting out reading someone else’s report or proof argument like I’ve been doing so that you can just right away get an idea of when and where they lived to helping differentiate them from all of the other people with that same name in the world.

Nicole (11m 24s):
So those key identifiers are really, really important. What I usually do is just put in their birth date and place their spouse, marriage data in place, and then their death taken place. And if I don’t have some of those, I just leave it out.

Diana (11m 37s):
Right. And you can also estimate often we’ve got censuses, may not always agree, but they can guide us to an estimated date or place. And that can help. Also, we want to have something that’s written down that we can match all the records that we’re to find against. And you may think, well, yeah, I’m going to remember when my person that I am researching was born or married and died. But you know, in the course of researching, your brain might get a little addled and you can’t remember those exact dates. So it’s very handy having it written, you know, we say, put it in the research log, the beginning of your report, put it everywhere. So you know what you are doing and you will keep from going off, down those paths of bright, shiny objects, because it’s not your objective.

Diana (12m 23s):
So let’s talk about some of these types of objectives. I have defined those in the book as identity relationships and ancestor actions, which kind of go right along with genealogies standards. Identity is of course key in genealogy. We’re always trying to figure out who this person is in the record. Is it our ancestor or is it another person at the same name? And that is where we run into so many problems. We see that on ancestry, family trees, we see it on the family search family tree where we’ve had people’s identities merged. And that’s a major, major problem with all of the online genealogy going on because, you know, it takes some time to differentiate people.

Diana (13m 8s):
So we might have an objective that really is trying to decide if the ancestor we have hypothesizes ours truly is ours, especially at there, maybe other people at the same name in the same county. So that might be a good identity question, a relationship question, you know, that can be often extending the pedigree who are the parents, or often we may want to do descendancy because we are trying to figure out some DNA matches. And our DNA matches our descendants of a common ancestor. We may have a whole project where we’re really working out the descendants of an ancestor. So we could use that with our DNA and we may have an established ancestry.

Diana (13m 56s):
Maybe it’s out of a biographical book, maybe it’s family search. You know, we see several generational links of a family going back, maybe for a span of a hundred or 200 years, whatever. We may be picking out one of those links and just wanting to verify it, you know, is this father really correct for this individual? And so even if it’s a known relationship, we may want to be verifying it. That’s actually a really good objective to do when we get back in time. And we haven’t done the research to verify, and then finally discovering ancestor actions. You know, once we have discovered relationships and we know more about our people, often we want to dig in and find out did they serve in the military?

Diana (14m 42s):
What was that like for them? Or what words their occupation, what was the like to be a farmer in Texas in the 1850s? What was their migration pattern? What would that have been like? How would they have come to the west from the east? So many interesting things that can add to the stories of our ancestors and that will speak to everyone differently. I’ve done entire projects for clients on just discovering the military actions of their ancestors. Those are really neat projects. I love those. So that is what we’re going to be using for our case study actually, because Nancy Briscoe is my second great grandmother [always had to check my pedigree retired] Thankfully it’s on my wall and Nancy Briscoe she had a long life.

Diana (15m 31s):
So she was born. I’ll read you my objectives. So you know, a little bit more about her. The objective for this project is to discover more about the life of Nancy E Briscoe born 7, February, 1847 in Benton county, Arkansas Nancy married, Richard Frazier about 1865 in Missouri and died 30 January, 1924 in love county, Oklahoma. So you’ll notice a migration from Arkansas, Missouri, and then to Oklahoma, while not mentioned in there is that she also spent some time in Texas and she lived from 1847 to 1924. So she lived a really good long life.

Diana (16m 12s):
I have pictures of Nancy with my grandmother as a little girl. So I have a kind of a cool connection with her, but quite honestly, in my genealogy, I just pretty much had dates and places and censuses did not have anything to fill in all those years. She did not leave a personal history. Nobody wrote anything about her. And if you were listening to those states, you’ll realize she would have been smack dab in the middle of the civil war. As a young woman I was really thinking that I wanted to learn more about what was happening. So you’ll see that my objective was pretty broad. I’m going to talk a little bit later in the episode about how sometimes after we’ve set an objective, we might want to go back and change it a little bit.

Diana (17m 1s):
Okay.

Nicole (17m 2s):
Absolutely. Yeah. Especially after we review what we know and we can kind of understand where we’re at and what further questions we have to help tweak and narrow down our objective a little bit. So before we go forward, I wanted to just respond to your discussion of the types of objectives. So identity relationship and ancestor actions earlier, when I was talking about genealogy standards, they say that your research question could be about identity, relationship, situations and events. And I was trying to think of a research question that has to do with the situation. And I just thought the article that we recently read in national genealogical society, quarterly that publication, it was an article about land it’s by Karen Mauer Green and Birdie Monk Holsclaw.

Nicole (17m 52s):
And it was from the NGSQ of June, 2012. And it was titled, Beginning at a Black Oak Hachenberger Evidence from a Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Neighborhood Reconstruction. And the situation that this article was focusing on was the fact that George Hachenbergerhad acquired land from his father-in-law Nicholas Hollander. And so the whole article goes through to prove that that situation did happen because that situation when proven proves that a relationship is accurate as well. So I thought that was a pretty good example of a proof argument that rests on a question of a situation.

Nicole (18m 35s):
But typically I think what our research focuses on is a relationship and identity. And often those ancestor actions that we will do a project on are key for proving a relationship or proving an identity, because we will need all the sources that we can to differentiate to people of the same name. I talked about this in our original series at the beginning episodes episodes two through eight or whatever it was when I talked about my Moses Eisenhower project and how there were two men of the same name, Moses Eisenhower in Texas, who had both been in the civil war and looking at their military records and their death records, I was able to separate them into two people.

Nicole (19m 19s):
So I think sometimes we want to research the actions of our ancestors because they are interesting and we want to know the stories, but oftentimes they will be really key to us being able to prove identity and relationship as well. So they really can go hand in hand with some of those other objectives.

Diana (19m 36s):
I think that’s a great example of how they really work together. Sometimes we want to really separate things out, but in genealogy, I think it’s really difficult to do that because an identity is made up of your relationships and what you do your actions, right? So it’s nice to kind of have these guiding principles, but then we also have to realize that it all works together.

Nicole (19m 60s):
Yeah. So going back to your objective for the Nancy Briscoe project, I was just going to point out all the great identifiers that you included. So to make sure that we know that this is the right Nancy Briscoe, we have a birth date for her. So you put in the full birth date at seven, February, 1847 and the county and state of birth, Benton county, Arkansas. And then of course we have our spouse, Richard Frazier. And now that we have her spouse, we really identified her, you know, because how many people named Nancy Briscoe married someone named Richard Frazier, probably zero once, you know, the spouse that really identifies the person, doesn’t it?

Nicole (20m 40s):
Yeah, it does. And then you also have a marriage a year and state and then a death and place of death tube. So this is a great objective with unique identifiers.

Diana (20m 52s):
Yeah. And even though I know a lot about Nancy Briscoe, having that written out is very helpful because there’s a lot of details there. A lot of places, a lot of dates and I for sure would not remember that as I was trying to look at censuses and see how they lined up. So it really is helpful to have that objective stated clearly and upfront.

Nicole (21m 13s):
.Now let’s talk about the steps for creating your own research objective. So if you decide to go forward this week and make an objective for a project first, you’ll want to analyze your pedigree and choose a question. Do you might have a person in your family tree whose connection to their parents seems a little dubious, maybe it hasn’t been proven. Maybe it’s just a guess, and you’re not sure. Maybe you have a person in your family tree who’s missing vital information. And you’re not really sure when they were born or when they were married or died. Maybe you’re missing some extra children. It could be that you haven’t looked at all the sources that are relevant to that person, whatever it is, you can go ahead and choose a question that you’d like to answer and then formulate your objective.

Nicole (22m 1s):
It might be nice to just brainstorm all the different questions that you have and then choose one that might be the appropriate question to start with. Oftentimes we suggest moving backward from what you know, to more distant times. So if you have an ancestor that you know, their death date and that kind of thing, maybe you want to move back toward researching their early life as a child and trying to discover their parents after you’ve done that. So after you formulate your objective, then write it down somewhere at the top of your research project document or your notes or your research log, whatever you’re going to use.

Nicole (22m 42s):
And we suggest using a document that we call the research project document. And at the top of that is a space for your objective. And then after that, you can include some more details about your research plan and your notes from your research,

Diana (22m 56s):
Right? Those are all great steps. And I love the idea of doing a brainstorming session so that you get a lot of different ideas about what you might want to do your research project for. We do that in the study group, we ask people to come up with a bunch of different ideas, and then we give some feedback on what would work well. So yeah, think of all those things that you’d like to know, what would be fun to do a project on. Now, I mentioned earlier that I sometimes have to tweak my objective and this can happen because after step two, when we analyze the records, we go back through everything we’ve already found. Sometimes we find the answer to our research objective right there in the records we already found.

Diana (23m 37s):
And so then we need to broaden our objective or change it all together. But sometimes we find that our research objective was way too dislike. Nicole, your example with the civil war men, where you wanted to research three men, and it was a little bit overwhelming and broad. So, you know, we sometimes are a little overzealous and we think we want to do this huge project. But the thing to keep in mind is if you do this huge project, when we come to writing the research report that can lend to kind of an overwhelming research report. So I always recommend if you’re just new to this process, you’ve never really written up your research, start with something a little bit more narrow so that you can finish up and actually go all the way through it with a written report at the end.

Diana (24m 27s):
So when I did some of the analysis of my Nancy Briscoe, I decided that what I really wanted to learn more about was her early life, all the way up to the civil war and just past reconstruction basically before she moved to Texas with her family in the 1870s. So I changed my objective a little bit to say the objective for this project is to discover more about the civil war era of the life of Nancy Briscoe. And then I included the same key identifiers of birth marriage and death. And that helped me to just narrow it down a bit. You know, obviously we have the Texas era and then they moved into Indian territory and then the era after Oklahoma statehood.

Diana (25m 12s):
So there were a lot of different facets of her life. And I didn’t want to have that all be one huge research project. I wanted to focus from basically her birth in 1847 to about 1865, maybe 1870, you know, that era. So I worked through, and I’ll talk about this later. I worked through the initial analysis and research planning and came up with this hypothesis, which we’ll talk about later, but I’ll just give you a little preview here. My hypothesis for the project was Nancy. APRA’s go experience 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 Frazier to Texas by 1870 and shaped their manger of her life.

Diana (26m 3s):
So I’ve got an objective and then I will be working on that hypothesis. So you have a little preview of maybe what we’ll be discovering about Nancy as we go through these episodes. Great.

Nicole (26m 16s):
Yeah, I can already tell that what your research plan will include is a lot of historical context and background information about what it was like in Arkansas and Missouri during the civil war. So that’ll be great.

Diana (26m 29s):
Yes. And it is amazing what we can learn about our ancestors from putting them into the context of where they were living. That adds so much to their story. And often we can discover more records about them when we do that.

Nicole (26m 46s):
Definitely. All right, everyone, we hope that you learned something new about research objectives and research questions today as we revisited this topic. So if you want to learn more about objectives, go back and listen to episode two, I believe where we first talk about it. And we have some articles that we’ll put in the show notes about objectives as well. And just remember that your objective will be view to be writing a research report. And after writing several reports, hopefully you’re ready to write a proof argument about your ancestor, about some aspect of their identity or relationship. All right, good luck to you.

Diana (27m 21s):
All right, everyone. Talk to you later. Bye-bye

Nicole (27m 25s):
Bye.

Diana (28m 42s):
I hope that all of you had a great time listening to that discussion on objectives and research questions. And I wanted to just comment that now that we’ve been through several DNA projects, we have really worked on spelling out various phases for the research. And I think this also works well with the difficult research question, such as finding the parents of our brick wall ancestor, some of the phases that you might want to do each one with their own specific objective would be to first thoroughly research the brick wall ancestors’ life, and that of all the children to discover clues to the origins. And then your second project, perhaps the second research phase would be to attract fan club members.

Diana (29m 26s):
So your friends, associates and neighbors, and that would include all the people with the same surname in the area. And for that project, you could be identifying possible parent candidates. Then a third phase of this overarching research would be to research those parent candidates and seek to eliminate a lot of them. We’re always hoping for the last man standing, and then maybe you’d need a fourth face to continue researching candidates. Maybe you had one that really stood out and you wanted to research him or her and seek for connections. So just some ideas that this overarching research question can be broken down into phases, whether you’re doing it for DNA or for just a really difficult research challenge.

Nicole (30m 12s):
Yes. I think that’s important. Any, not this really comes from our experiences with working for clients because they rarely say work on this until you find the answer. It’s usually been purchasing increments of 20 hours. And so we do have to put it into these phases when we do that. And it can be helpful to do this in your personal research as well, just because we rarely have a hundred hours in a month or in a normal amount of time just to dedicate only to that one project. And so it is helpful to break it up for our personal research to

Diana (30m 45s):
Right. I think one of the problems that we have with our personal research has we tend to just research, research, research, and never stop and write up what we’ve done and really analyze what we’ve done to figure out what to do next. We just kind of keep spinning our wheels. So that’s the whole purpose of coming up with the research objective and doing a complete project.

Nicole (31m 4s):
All right. Well, good luck everybody with creating your research objective for the new year. And we’ll talk to you again next

Diana (31m 11s):
Week. All right. Bye. Bye everyone.

Nicole (31m 51s):
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 books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.