RLP 187: Revisiting Research Planning Again

Nicole (1s):
This is episode 187, Revisiting Research Planning 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. 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.

Nicole (42s):
Let’s go, hello everybody. Welcome to rResearch Like a Pro

Diana (46s):
Hi Nicole and hi to everyone listening. We are revisiting Research Like a Pro steps in this series. And today we are going to revisit our episode on research planning. This was originally episode 116.

Nicole (1m 2s):
So listen to this episode about how we make a research plan. Diana will share her example of planning to learn historical context about Nancy Brisco’s early life. Then we’ll talk to you again afterward with some updates.

Diana (1m 15s):
Well, let’s jump into what we’re going to talk about today, and that is research planning.

Nicole (1m 20s):
So when you get started making your research plan, you’ll probably want to revisit your objective and just see if you need to tweak it at all. Because after you have reviewed your timeline and analyze the sources, maybe you have noticed that you have a really good guests for who’s. A parent of your person is, or you kind of have a more specific thing you want to focus on. So you can tweak your objective and the research plan and decide this phase of research will be to figure out if so-and-so is the father of my research subject. And that can be a more focused phase of research for your overarching research question, which could be who are the parents of so-and-so.

Nicole (2m 2s):
So if you want to do that, then the research plan is a good time to do it. And to just review your timeline and see what jumps out at you, maybe you can also tweak some of the identifiers in your objective. Like if you notice that somebody had land and then the land was sold by their heirs, you can put in an estimate for their death date and place. Maybe you didn’t have that before. And sometimes that can be really helpful when you’re research planning to recognize that they were deceased after a certain time. So that can guide you toward records during their life, or guide you to look for records that would have been created at their death and get more specific.

Nicole (2m 44s):
So revisit your objective and tweak it if you need to, and this will help guide your plan,

Diana (2m 49s):
Right? That’s great advice. I think sometimes we get started and we’ve forgotten some of the things in our research. And so we do need to change our objective up a little bit after those initial. So after our objective is just how we want it. We want to create a summary of known facts, and you just use your timeline for this. You’ve already put everything into your timeline, but I like to make this just a simple table. The timeline has got a lot of information in it, your source citation, your analysis, a lot of details. And I like to take a simple table in my document and just put the date, the event, the place and how I know it.

Diana (3m 32s):
So, you know, 1850 census. So for instance, if I’m wondering, how do I know again, that this ancestor was born in Kentucky? I can just look at that summary of known facts and go, oh, it was this and this that’s us, or it was the death certificate of a child.

Nicole (3m 48s):
Yeah, that’s really good because sometimes we’ll have things in our timeline that we realize are secondary information or it’s authored an assistant, not very high quality. So we can leave that out of our known facts. If we don’t feel that it’s important, or maybe it’s some kind of information that we’ve decided isn’t useful or credible because of our analysis. So in the summary of known facts, you can just put those facts that you really think are reliable. Do you may not know for sure yet, but you can just put in whatever you think is going to be the most useful to guide your plan, right? So the next step is to create a working hypothesis. And this is where you just share a quick summary of what you think you’re going to find and what records could reveal that.

Nicole (4m 34s):
So it could be just an educated guess about when the person died, if that’s your objective or a guess about where the parents may have lived. If you’re looking for the parents, sometimes you’ll have a guest like a true hypothesis of who the parent is. And you can put that there, or maybe you have a very open-ended hypothesis for who the parent is that it was somebody who was born in Georgia around this time. Maybe they lived in a certain county because that’s where the marriage occurred for the daughter. So it doesn’t have to be a specific name. It can just be what you know, and if you have the 1880 census of a person that says their parents’ birth places, maybe that’s all you’ll have. It just really depends on what you have in your known facts.

Nicole (5m 14s):
So using those known facts create a hypothesis that states what you think the answer will be and what records could test that hypothesis.

Diana (5m 22s):
Going back to our listener comment about doing a brain dump. I kind of likened this hypothesis to that. This is where you actually write out what you think happened. A lot of people get a little stuck on this and they’re thinking, well, I don’t know what happened. How am I supposed to imagine what happened? But you know, you have some little clues from things. And so you can have a hypothesis that you’re going to test. One of the things that I like to do is to also put in a little bit about methodology that I’m going to use. Sometimes I’ll say something like, well, this would benefit from a census study, or this would benefit from really looking at all the probate. Some of those ideas that have just been generating in the back of your mind, you can put that into your hypothesis about how you would like to approach this problem and what you think you might be able to find from doing that.

Diana (6m 14s):
Okay.

Nicole (6m 14s):
I read an example of a hypothesis. We probably read this on the first episode about creating a hypothesis, but I’m just going to read it again. So if your objective is to find the father of Cynthia Dillard, here’s what the hypothesis could be. Cynthia Dillard’s father was probably born in Virginia about 1795 or earlier. He moved to Georgia by 1815, where Cynthia was born. He was living in the vicinity of Morgan county, Georgia by 1833, when Cynthia married, Thomas Beverly Royston. He possibly died in Georgia or in Alabama, if he also migrated to Alabama like Cynthia and her husband Thomas Royston. So you can see, we don’t know the name of Cynthia’s father.

Nicole (6m 55s):
We just have these clues from records, from Cynthia’s life that we can use to kind of make a guess about where to look

Diana (7m 3s):
Exactly. And I think it’s fun to write the hypothesis. I really enjoy that step. It’s interesting because we talk a lot about how, when you write things, connections form in your brain. And I think the hypothesis is a really good example of this. Sometimes I’ll feel a little scattered with my research and I’ve looked at all these records on my timeline and it made my summary, Ben, I am still just not wrapping my head around what I need to look for, what I need to do. But as soon as I start writing, somehow those connections start farming and I’m able to pull some things together to decide how to approach this research project. Absolutely.

Nicole (7m 39s):
And you may have heard in genealogy standards and things like that, that you need to have something to test with records. And that’s really what the hypothesis gives you. It gives you something that you can go and test and see if it’s true with records. So if Cynthia Dillard’s father was living in not Morgan county, when she got married in 1933, we can go test that by looking to see if there were any people with the surname of Dillard living around them in that place.

Diana (8m 10s):
Absolutely. So after we have got that good working hypothesis written out, then the next step in the research plan is to identify the sources to search. So we’ve got an idea of what we want to do. If it was the census study or the probate or marriage. Now we have to go look at our locality guide and see where to find those records. Are they in the family search catalog? Are they online? Do we need to write a courthouse? Do we need to look on Ancestry.com? Do we need to write our aunt who we think might have the record? You know, there’s just so many different sources for trying to answer our research question and to further our objectives.

Diana (8m 51s):
So this is again, an opportunity to kind of do a brain dump. I like to do a bulleted list and I just looked through my locality guide. I get all my ideas in there for the different places, the different specific sources I could search. So I like to be specific enough that it’s actually a working plan. So in other words, I wouldn’t just put well searched. The marriage records of Morgan county, Georgia. I would go look on the FamilySearch catalog, get the actual microfilm online collection and paste that right in there, or make myself a note that I would have to go to a family history center to view that or to the Family History Library or to write to the Georgia archives.

Diana (9m 35s):
I’d be really specific because how are we going to prioritize this list if we don’t really understand what that source is and how we’re going to obtain it?

Nicole (9m 44s):
Good idea. I like that thought that we should understand the sources before we can prioritize them. Alright. So the next step is to prioritize your research strategy. And this is a fun step. You just get to decide which records you’re going to search first. And sometimes you prioritize based on access. So if a record is online or if it’s indexed, the ease of access might cause you to prioritize it first. And another thing you might look at is the ability of that record to answer your research question. So if there’s a record set, that’s most likely going to answer your question. You’re going to want to put that higher up on your list because you could spend a lot of time researching and other collections that are easy.

Nicole (10m 25s):
But if the one thing you need to do is just search in this probate collection. That’s only available on microfilm somewhere. Then maybe you need to just focus on that and get that one thing done before you do anything else. Because if that contains the answer to your objective, then you will have saved yourself a lot of time. So there’s a few things to consider when you prioritize. And it’s always different for every project in each person. So just consider the access and the ability of that record to answer your question.

Diana (10m 55s):
And I like to say just two about five things in your research plan, because sometimes you answer your question in the first one or two, and if you’ve got this long list of 20 things, you’ve wasted some time. I learned that when I was doing accreditation, that you should just list about five things and then go from there. So let me go through my example that we are using for this whole series of revisiting the research, like approach process on that’s from Nancy Briscoe’s life. My objective was to learn more about her early life. I didn’t know much about her when she was living in Arkansas, kind of on the border of Arkansas and Missouri know a lot more about the family.

Diana (11m 37s):
Once they moved out to Texas and then up into Indian territory, and that became Oklahoma, but I wanted to know more about what was going on with her. So I created this hypothesis, Nancy E Briscoe experienced the civil war as a young woman growing up on the border of Arkansas and Missouri. The devastation of war precipitated the move of Nancy and her Confederate veteran husband, Richard Fraser to Texas by 1870 and shaped the remainder of her life. So I didn’t really know for sure, you know, what would have been like for her in the civil war, but I knew the civil war was happening and I knew it was taking place in that area. So I just made a hypothesis that this played an important part in her life.

Diana (12m 21s):
And I wanted to learn more about that now in looking for identified sources, you know, this is a little bit different type of an objective. I’m not looking for a father or a spouse, so I’m not looking for some of the records that we typically might use. But what I instead wanted to focus on were county histories to learn specifics about the history right there, where she was living. And then I also wanted to learn just a little bit more detail about when the family moved back and forth, because I had her being born in different states, you know, and I realized they were on the border for my locality research by wanting to get a little bit better idea of perhaps when they moved.

Diana (13m 3s):
So I wanted to look at some tax records and I was pretty sure that I had already searched all the marriage records. I could back when we first started, because she is a direct line ancestor, but I had not kept track of those in a research log. And so I put that in my research ideas as well that I could go check out marriage records for her. And often you’ll find this, that you think you’ve maybe search something, but if you have no record of it, it’s great to put it in your research plan because once you do that and it’s in your research log and it’s written up in your report, you don’t need to do that search again, that can really save you time down the road.

Diana (13m 45s):
And then once I had this list of sources of things that I could look at and specifics, you know, what books I could look in and what collections, then I prioritized everything. And I decided to do those county histories very first because those books were both digitized. And I knew I could look at those really easily. Another thing that I had wanted to do was to look for a census conundrum. I had a person show up at one of the censuses. I wasn’t sure who they were. And I decided I wanted to put that in my research plan to see if I could quickly figure them out. I put in as number three, to view maps of the area to go really local with the maps.

Diana (14m 27s):
And I wanted to research the civil war companies and battles because Nancy mentioned specific companies and things that happened in the civil war for her husband and they’re right there in our pension application. So I wanted to research them and see if that panned out, you know, did she have a good memory? Does she remembering this correctly where these things actually taking place somewhere? That makes sense. That ended up being really only four items for my research plan, but I love having it really specific. So I could just go through them one by one and do the research and enter it into my log.

Nicole (15m 8s):
Fantastic. That’s such a good research strategy. I’d like this plan because it’s a little bit unique. You’re really trying to understand some of the historical and geographic context. So it really makes sense that you’re going to focus on those county histories and some of those maps and things.

Diana (15m 26s):
Well, I was just trying to think of some of the common questions that we get, because we’re trying to answer those in this series. And I think maybe one of those things is, and I already mentioned it is how much should I put in this and how exactly do I put this together? So any thoughts on that? Yeah,

Nicole (15m 47s):
We mentioned before, it’s a good idea to keep it simple. And part of the reason of that is that you may find the answer in your first or second step. So if you’ve gone and made a very long and detailed research plan, that could have been a waste of time. If when you do your first or your second search, you find the answer. You may end up wanting to do the rest of the searches anyway, if they are applicable to your ancestor, but it’s good to just be flexible and also continue making your plan as you go. So if you have one or two things that you really think are important to check first, before you make any more of your plan than just plan for two things. And then when that phase of research is done, you can decide to either write your report or continue on with making more sources to search in your plan.

Nicole (16m 33s):
So I think that’s a really helpful step to think about the fact that you don’t have to end your research. As soon as you finish everything in your plan. If you want to keep planning more sources to search, you can, sometimes this happens if you have negative searches for your first few sources, and you want to try a few more things that you had brainstormed earlier, it’s okay for your plan to be flexible. And if you do that, it doesn’t mean that you’re chasing a rabbit hole. It just means that you are being flexible. And you are thinking about what you learned from the first few steps you took.

Diana (17m 8s):
I like that philosophy. And do you know, you really have to be thinking about your project and the fact that you do want to write this up. So you want to have a stopping point sometime, and that can be kind of tricky with this negative searches, because you are going to be putting that into your report and you don’t want to go on and on and on searching for things. Cause then when you go to write it up, that might seem kind of overwhelming. So you might be just sort of tired after you’ve done your five or six, or maybe it’s turned out to be seven searches. And maybe it is time to stop and start writing. If you haven’t already started writing things up and every project will be a little bit different.

Diana (17m 48s):
So don’t be too rigid. How you have to do this, you know, use the basic structure of research planning, but then fit it to whatever project you are working on at the time.

Nicole (17m 59s):
And I’m glad you mentioned that there needs to be a stopping point, where you can write your report. I think if we just continue researching until we find the answer, sometimes we get bogged down. And so I wouldn’t go too long without writing a report. If you’re going to forget what you learned in your research. So if you’ve been working on it, you know, every other day for a week or two, you’ll probably have a natural stopping point where you’re going to have something new come up, you’re starting a new class. You know, you’re going somewhere. You don’t have much time to work on it anymore. It’s a good idea to write your report before that happens. It’s so that you can get out from your brain, everything that you learned during this phase of research. So it’s good to have those defined phases.

Diana (18m 42s):
It really is. And I say a lot in the book, consider yourself your own client. And for my client work, I’ve only been hired to do 10 or 20 hours. I haven’t been hired to research indefinitely and we can use that same philosophy for our own research. You know, I’m going to just see this as a 10 hour project. And so when you come to the end of that research plan, write it up. And the fun thing is that if you didn’t get to some of the things, you can put those in future research suggestions, you know, we always have ideas of what to do next. And that’s the beauty of having that section, that future research that will go into the report. So let’s say you are having that situation where you’re going on a trip and you only got two things researched, but you found a lot of good stuff, put numbers three, four, and five in your future research.

Diana (19m 32s):
And just write up what you found in numbers one and two. So there’s a lot of ways to, to look at this and a lot of ways to use research planning to help you become a much better researcher. So I hope everybody will go try doing a plan if you’ve never done it, try it out and then let us know how it worked for you.

Nicole (19m 53s):
Okay. Well, I hope you enjoyed that discussion. I just have one thing to add about research planning. In this episode, we kind of talked about revising the objective during the research planning. Now, one piece of advice I would give, if you are doing a project for a client, then your report should always use that same objective that you gave the client at the beginning of the project and that’s in the contract. And if you decide to go ahead and revise the objective for your own use during the research plan, that’s fine, but it’s really important that the client sees the objective that they agreed to. And you started with, and then any tweaks that you learned as you did your own analysis of their records and that kind of thing, you can put that revised objective later on in the report.

Nicole (20m 35s):
But I just think it’s good for the client to see this is where we started. And then after I started working and analyzing and things, this is the objective I revised it to, and this is kind of how we went forward. So often we will email a client and just say, how about we on this more narrow objective? And they’ll say, yes, whatever you think is best or they’ll have a certain idea that they really want to focus on. So I think that’s an important thing for client research.

Diana (20m 58s):
I do too. And that can all be part of your background information. You, after you go through what you’ve done, you know, writing that up in the report, then you can say, well, based on the background information, all this analysis of previous research, it was decided to focus more on this and then do the revised objectives. So I think that’s great advice.

Nicole (21m 18s):
Great. Sometimes when we are writing up a report, we want to use kind of the new information we found in the objective. But I think for clients, especially the, the objectives should be the same so that they can really see what was learned.

Diana (21m 32s):
Well, we hope you all enjoyed research planning again, and good luck on making your research plans. Have a great

Nicole (21m 39s):
Week. We’ll talk to you again next week. Bye bye.

Diana (21m 43s):
Bye.

Nicole (21m 43s):
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.