RLP 190: Revisiting Report Writing Again

Nicole (1s):
This is episode 190 revisiting report writing 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. Let’s go.

Nicole (41s):
Hello everybody, Welcome to Research Like a Pro today.

Diana (44s):
Hi, Nicole, and hello to everyone listening today, we are doing our final piece of our series on revisiting the Research Like a Pro process and talking about writing the report. So we are going to go through the report that I did on my Nancy Briscoe project. And we’ll use that as an example, to explain what you put in a research report. If you’ve been listening to us or following our process, and maybe you haven’t tried writing a research report yet, maybe this will give you some inspiration. So the original episode was119 that we recorded in 2020. And we will come back at the end of this episode and give some more thoughts and ideas for what we have learned since then.

Diana (1m 27s):
So enjoy this episode

Nicole (1m 29s):
Today we’re talking about writing up research reports. I’ll talk first about why do you need to do a research report if you would don’t have a client, should you still write a report to yourself and why? So if you don’t do that, then you risk forgetting all of the ideas and thoughts that you had after you did this research and you might have faint memories of something like, oh yeah, that name sounds so familiar, but you probably won’t remember everything that you concluded from your research. So writing your report, even when you haven’t found the answer you’re looking for can really help you in the future as you come back to the project. And we all know life happens and we don’t continue researching and all of our family members in perfect sequence.

Nicole (2m 15s):
So if you have to take a break from that research, you should definitely consider writing a summary of what you found, even if it’s just some really quick paragraphs. It’s just much easier to read a narrative account of what you found rather than looking at the research log and trying to figure out what you found. The research talk will be helpful, but the report and the conclusions is even better. And then another benefit of writing your results is that the process of writing helps you form connections and see the things that are missing to see things that are strong pieces of evidence and give them appropriate weight. It also helps you to look at the record a little more closely than you might have if you have to write about it and it, and concisely discuss the relevant evidence.

Nicole (3m 4s):
So one of the things that you might want to do is when you’re writing your notes in your research log to go ahead and jump over to your report document, and just write a paragraph about that source. And then you won’t have to come back to it again, because if it’s a very important source that you found for your research objective, and you know, you’re going to write about it in your report, you can kind of do the right as you go on with it. And just go ahead into your report and write about that and source analysis that you did while you looked at it and you’re doing like a census. You can abstract it into a table and just get it all done right then. And that’s a really efficient way to research and write kind of as you go.

Nicole (3m 44s):
And then of course, as you write up your results and write a report, you can share your results much more easily with other researchers and cousins. So having a finished product to share is awesome. And you’ll probably want to post it on your ancestry tree as a document on FamilySearch family tree, then other people can see what you found.

Diana (4m 5s):
Right? I love having something written up to share because a lot of times people will contact me their DNA match, or they’ve seen something that I’ve written about the family and want more information, and it can take so long to write that out in an email. So I love it when I have a report written or a summary that I can just copy and paste into an email. So one of the things that I started doing years ago, because I had gone to a class, I think, and the presenter had said something like you should always write up your research at least as a summary in the notes of your genealogy program. So I started doing that at that time, we were using ancestor requests. And so I have summaries of all my mainline ancestors, and now as they go back and review some of the research, I am so grateful that I’ve got those summaries there.

Diana (4m 55s):
I have the sources in the genealogy program. So they’re not attached to the source citations, which is what I do now. But at least I have something written. So for anyone listening, if you’ve never written up anything about your research, try doing at least that to go in and write a summary, and you can reference some of the sources that you found like a census record or the death certificate or whatever. But if you’re really ready to kind of make the jump to doing research reports, I think you’ll find that it’s even more satisfying to write something out and then have the source citation attached to it. So we’ll, we’ll talk about how to put this all together. And the first thing that you have to think about is who’s going to be reading this report, you know, is it just for yourself, which is fabulous because we are our own client.

Diana (5m 42s):
We want to make sure we are keeping track of everything we’re doing in our research. So we don’t redo things over and over again, but maybe you are working professionally and you are writing for a client. You could be writing for your family. Maybe you’re writing a family history. Maybe you’re doing it for a gift for Christmas, for all the family members, or you want to have a legacy to pass down to the next generation. So many different kinds of things that you might be writing. And maybe you have cleared up a longstanding brick wall or solved a genealogical problem. And you want to publish that in a journal or a periodical. So there’s a lot of different things that you could be writing for, but it’s good to think about who your audience is that will maybe change a little bit about how you’re writing and the reason why is you want to decide if you’re going to be more formal or less formal in your writing.

Diana (6m 37s):
So if you’re writing for your family members, maybe it would be less formal and you would talk about, you know, our grandmother or our ancestor. But if you are writing for a client or a journal, then you always use third person and you just take out any instances of I or you or hour. And just talk about the person in the third person, naming them by name Florence, married Edward on this date. So it’s just that me to think about. And when I review reports for some of the study groups that I participate in, I see that a lot, the eye comes into play and the person writing it doesn’t even realize it they’ll say something like, well, I think this, or, you know, I found this record.

Diana (7m 23s):
And so we can just take all that out. You can just say the record shows this or the certificate reveals the name. It’s just something that you have to be aware of and look at it in your writing and it gets easier. The more you do it. Absolutely.

Nicole (7m 36s):
Another thing that you can do is just state the facts from the source and not even talk about the source itself. If you’re doing a more formal like case study or proof argument, you can just say, Mary married James on whatever date, then the source citation, the footnote will tell you what the source was that revealed that. So you don’t even need to include the certificate revealed that Mary married James, but it is good in a research report to include that because in a report it’s more of a discussion of what was found during the research session. So you do more discussion of the sources that were used and discussing what you would expect to find from a source and that type of thing.

Nicole (8m 23s):
And that’s really helpful to ourselves and to the client to understand why this record type was searched and that kind of thing. Okay. So how do you start when you’re writing a research report? Well, one of the things that I talked about a little bit last time that I would like to suggest is that you make an outline and this is something that really is helpful when you’re starting with a lot of data points and you’re not sure how to organize them. You can just go through your research log and put little notes into an outline first I’ll talk about, and then this and that, and kind of put them in order and group them into sections. And it’s easier to do that in an outline than it is to just write everything and then move it all around.

Nicole (9m 7s):
So I would suggest doing an outline. And if you have done some writing, as you go, you can still do your outline. Then just put the paragraphs that you’ve already written into order. So it’s easier to start off with just a little bit of organization like that. And then after you have your outline, you can go through it and flush out each section and use your research log notes and your citations that you created to quickly add those in to the report. So hopefully as you were making your research log, you added your citations right then, so that it’s easy to just copy and paste them over to your document. Wow.

Diana (9m 44s):
I totally agree with the outline because as I’ve been doing more and more projects with DNA and you have both DNA to discuss and the records that makes it even more complicated, and sometimes it’s tricky figuring out which one to talk about first or how to mix those two together in the report. So I have started always doing an outline and trying to think what makes the most sense and what will help whoever’s reading and understand the case, the easiest. So I become a huge proponent of outlines, especially when working with DNA, but even in regular traditional research, sometimes it doesn’t always make sense to present the findings in the order you found them.

Diana (10m 27s):
And sometimes you want to start with something that maybe you found at the very end, but it just makes more sense to discuss it at the beginning. So an outline kind of helps you think through what you’re going to discuss and think of the best way to put it into your report. So let’s talk about the elements of a report. We always want to state our objective right at the beginning so that we know exactly what this report was supposed to be discovering. And then we wanted to put in some background information, what we knew when we started out, or if there is some background history or geographical information, if maybe there’s a family myth or a story that we’re trying to prove or disprove every case will be a little different about what that background information should include.

Diana (11m 16s):
And then we want the body of the report. This is where we put everything that we found after that. I like to do a good conclusion, summarizing everything that we just discussed for the reader. And then we always end with future research suggestions because in a research report, there should always be something to come next. As we’re doing the research, we will find additional people to research extended family or associates, or we’ll think of a new avenue that we could research based on the findings. And the beauty of doing just a research project is knowing that we have those future suggestions.

Diana (11m 56s):
So we don’t have to go off on these tangents of researching. We can put all of those tangents into future research and those can become the basis for future projects. I think that eases our brain from focusing on all the things that we want to do and lets us realize we can do it next time. We don’t have to worry about it. Let’s stay focused on this specific project.

Nicole (12m 20s):
That’s great. All right. Let’s talk about the research objective. So the example research objective that we’re using today is for Diana’s report on Nancy Briscoe. So the objective was the objective for this project is to discover more about the life of Nancy Brisco, born seven, February, 1847 in Benton county, Arkansas and Nancy married Richard Frazier about 1865 in Missouri and died 30 January, 1924 in love county, Oklahoma. And of course it’s important to put the objective at the top of the report. So all the readers know what you were searching for. And the next section is the background information. And this is where you put in everything that was known previously to the research.

Nicole (13m 3s):
You can include some of the family myths and the lore, whatever was passed down to the client or to you about the project and kind of some ideas that they might’ve had hypothesis they wanted you to look at. And then you can also add some background information here about the time period and the location where the research question was, this is helpful for just setting the stage and understanding the historic and geographic context. The next thing you might want to include in your background information is anything about record availability or record loss. If there were courthouse fires or problems that make it difficult to research in that region or time period, this is a really good place to talk about that you can talk about major historical events that may have also affected record creation or loss like the civil war or the great depression or something along those lines.

Nicole (13m 60s):
Just try to ask yourself what will help the reader better understand the findings that I’m going to present here and put them into the appropriate context. For our example, this is the background paragraph that Diana wrote the early years of Nancy Briscoe were known only through the census records of 1850, 1860 and 1870. No marriage record had been found for her marriage to Richard Frazier and the date of 1865 only estimated from the 1900 census, noting that she had been 35 years in her current marriage. This research project sought to discover more about her life on the Missouri Arkansas border before she moved to Texas with her husband by 1880.

Diana (14m 45s):
Okay. So you’ll notice in that little bit of background information, I basically was summing up the research that had been known previously for her about this period in her life, just to set the stage for what we were going to talk about in the report. So the body of the report, let’s talk about how you can organize that. There’s lots of different ways you can do this. And it really depends on what you’re trying to report the objective and what you found. So you can organize by record types. Perhaps you want to talk about a census and then a marriage record, and then the land records or the probate, and that might work really well.

Diana (15m 25s):
In some projects you could be arranging it chronologically. You may want to just start with the earliest record, like a birth record and move throughout a person’s life. Maybe you are doing something that has to do more with geographically explaining things like migration, talking about an ancestor in one location, and then talking about their move to a new location and the records there. So there’s all sorts of different ways. And as you’re making that outline, it will come clear to you how you want to organize your research report. And it can be a mix. You know, I have done reports where maybe I will do it geographically and I’ll discuss records in Virginia and I’ll do maybe some census land and probate, and then I’ll move on to records in Tennessee with the same types of records.

Diana (16m 17s):
So you can certainly have subheadings under your main headings. And that can work really, really well. So for my Briscoe project, what did I do for the project headings? Well, in this one, I did use sort of a combination of record types and chronology. So I started with the widow’s pension application that I discovered for Nancy Briscoe. And this was not obviously the earliest record of her life. It was actually one of the latest records of her life. You know, she did this widow’s pension application well into the 19 hundreds, but it talked about her life in her early years.

Diana (16m 58s):
And I wanted to start with it because it gave some really good information to build this project on. So I did start with that. And then I talked more about proving her birth because she is one of those people that has different birth years and birth places, depending on the record. So I wanted to try to resolve some of that conflicting information. And then I wanted to discuss the civil war and the marriage of Nancy Brisco and Richard Frazier. So I organize that by record type and sort of a chronology, a little bit backwards, you know, starting at a point and then going back in time.

Diana (17m 41s):
But it made sense in my report now, after you’ve got things organized, you’ve got your headings. You can start in on doing your actual discussion. And like you said, Nicole, you can talk about why you searched for a record type and what you hope to find if you are writing for a client or for someone else, whether you’re getting paid or not often you’ll need to explain something about that record. Why would you go search in a land record? What are you hoping to find in that? Because not everybody is a genealogist that we’re going to give our reports to and they may need to learn about the records.

Diana (18m 21s):
They may never have even heard of a census record and may not realize that that information could be inaccurate depending on the informant. So a report gives us an opportunity to educate others as well as the spell things out for ourselves. So we remember why we were looking for something now we’ll want to include negative and positive searches. Negative is so important to include often. We just want to ignore negative searches, but we don’t want to either in our research log or our report, because it won’t demonstrate that reasonably exhaustive research, if we’ve not said something about negative searches. Now here is an example of what I wrote in my Nancy Briscoe project.

Diana (19m 5s):
So this is what I said about the pension application, discovering the widow’s pension application for Nancy Frasier opened the door to her, learning more about her early life because her husband, Richard Frazier had fought for the Confederacy in the civil war. She had to apply for a pension from the state of Oklahoma. The United States government did not give pensions to Confederate army veterans. So each Southern state passed their own pension laws. So there, I’m giving a little bit of explanation about the pensions and why she would have one from the state of Oklahoma. And then I give a little bit of information about searching for her birth. And I say as with so many individuals, the records vary for her birth year, but center on 1847 or 1848 birth information for each individual in the census was generally given by the head of household who may or may not have known the exact year where Nancy herself gave the information.

Diana (20m 0s):
Her date of birth was noted as 1848 and birthplace of Barry county, Missouri, or just Missouri. This is likely the most accurate date and place. So you’ll see that I’m reporting on the information, but then I’m also giving some conclusions. It’s up to us as a researcher to put forth some conclusions, where are the ones that have been studying this and working on it. And we can put our opinions in there, but we use those qualifiers like most likely, or probably because we don’t know for sure on some things what happened, but it’s okay to put forth a conclusion and then add a qualifier so that we’re not saying we know for sure, but this is most likely, that’s a really good point that we need to use those qualifiers.

Nicole (20m 48s):
I think sometimes we’re tempted to say, I think our it’s my opinion. And I had a teacher in high school who said, you don’t need to say that because we already know it’s your opinion. You’re the one writing it, but it is helpful to use a qualifier to let the reader know that this is something that you have decided is likely, or almost certain or probable it’s something that you’re inferring, but also the level of certainty. And then you don’t have to say, it’s my opinion, or I think you can just say, this is likely. And then obviously somebody else could go ahead and disagree with that if they want to do, and they could write their own report,

Diana (21m 33s):
Say it also leaves it open to other records coming in and proving something different because how many times do we think we know something and then a record pops up and changes the whole course of the research. So we always want to leave ourselves kind of a backdoor in case we really don’t have things quite right. And those qualifiers help us with that as well.

Nicole (21m 57s):
Yeah, that’s true. And that really shows one of the main differences between writing research reports, which is research in progress and completed research, which is research that would meet the genealogical proof standard. And, you know, you think you’ve completed reasonably exhaustive research and found pretty much all the records that would be relevant. So it’s good to remember what type of research you’re writing about. So if it is a report and it’s still in progress and you have lots of ideas for future research, then just know that it’s research in progress. So you don’t have to know all the answers yet. And you can just say what the research shows so far. So as you go throughout your report, you’ll do a lot of presenting of information.

Nicole (22m 38s):
And it’s a good idea to present all the evidence that you found and tell how it leads to your conclusion, even conflicting evidence. So part of the genealogical proof standard is that you resolve conflicting evidence. Now, if you’re writing about research and progress, you may not have resolutions for all the conflicts yet, but it’s good to present them to show all the evidence that has been found and maybe discuss a preliminary conclusion or a hypothesis for what you think would resolve the conflicts and give some more ideas for future research that would help resolve the conflicts. So one way that you can present evidence in a research report is by using tables or bullet points.

Nicole (23m 21s):
We use bullet points a lot. When you have a lot of data that you want to share, instead of writing it all out in sentences, it might seem wordy and kind of repetitive. So it might be easier to use a bulleted list. And an example of this is when you’re listing off the civil war service, somebody or another kind of list of information from a compiled military service record. So in this report, Diana had a list of Nancy’s husband, Richard Frazier, all of his civil war service and the dates and the information from that pension application. So the blood list starts off with August 27th, 1862, when he enlisted in McDonald county and he was enlisted by captain Clinton.

Nicole (24m 8s):
The next bullet point is that on October 30th, 1862, just a few months later, he was present on a muster roll in Fulton county, Arkansas, and he was detailed as a teamster to the regiment team master from November 1st to the present. Then the next bullet point was January and February of 1864. He was present on the company muster roll. So that was a couple years later. And then the next year, June 7th, 1865, he appears on a roll of prisoners of war of company F third regiment, Missouri cavalry Confederate army commanded by captain Charles K.

Nicole (24m 50s):
Polk surrendered at new Orleans, Louisiana by general Smith. This role was dated June 7th, 1865. So that information is probably best presented in a bulleted list, unless you’re going to go into some more explanation and discussion of some of these pieces of information, since that wasn’t super relevant to Nancy, just listing it in a bulleted list is a good idea. It does give some information about her husband’s service and help see what he went through during the war, but going into a lot of extra detail about that, maybe was it needed at that moment, or maybe you could do it later, but a bulleted list is sometimes a really good idea.

Nicole (25m 31s):
Another thing you can do and you’re presenting all the different evidence is you subheadings in bold print or a larger font size to indicate a new section. Another thing you might want to add is some contextual information about the geography or the history or the legal side of things. You can explain terms, add maps and Diana’s report. She added a map of the Missouri Arkansas border because that’s where Nancy was residing at that time. And it showed the Ozark mountain range. And another thing that we like to use in reports are tables. Tables are very concise way of presenting information and comparing and contrasting information, which is correlation.

Nicole (26m 12s):
So if you want to show all of the information about someone’s birth, you can put that into a table to show the date that was given and the source that that date came from. And then somebody can quickly look through that and see all the different dates and kind of figure out which data’s most likely. So Diana did that with her Nancy Briscoe report and table one was all the birth information for Nancy Briscoe. And of course, I’ve talked about this before that we like to put census information into tables because it’s somewhat wordy to go through each person in a census household and discuss when they were born and where they were born. And you may want to put in a screenshot of the census, but I prefer putting in a transcribed table because it makes it easier for clients and ourselves to quickly read and compare the information when it’s typed.

Nicole (27m 3s):
And then of course, we need to add source citations for each genealogical statement, add a footnote for those. And if you have two sentences that all come from the same source, I think it’s okay to put that footnote at the end of those two sentences. Sometimes we see in people’s reports that they put a footnote in the middle of a sentence, and that’s because they have like two source citations that they want to include for that one sentence, but typically the best practice for that, that we’ve noticed others doing. And that kind of makes sense to us is to put the footnote at the end of the sentence. And then in your footnote, you can include two or three or four source citations in a paragraph.

Nicole (27m 47s):
So each source citation is like its own sentence. And then when it’s done with a period, you can start another source citation in that footnote. If you can also use transition words in between citations, like for Mary’s marriage C and then put the citation for the marriage. So when you’re doing your footnotes and you add your source citations for each genealogical statement or a statement, that’s not common knowledge, you can just put a footnote in and then copy and paste from your research log. And some examples of a footnote from Diana’s report is when she gave some information about Marmaduke’s division, which was mentioned in the pension application, she cited an article that she found on an online encyclopedia about John S Marmaduke.

Nicole (28m 40s):
It was like a civil war encyclopedia. So if you are going to be giving some background information like that, it’s really helpful to cite that because it probably isn’t common knowledge. So you can just copy and paste that from your research log. And what we like to use to quickly add a footnote is the shortcut control alt F. And you can use that in word or in Google docs, and that quickly adds a footnote for you.

Diana (29m 8s):
So I wanted to mention how nice it is when you have your source in your report, because let’s say that I wanted to go back and write another entire report or do a project on Richard Frazier, civil war service. I would be able to take that report and go straight to those different references like that article about Marmaduke’s division. And I can really easily retrace my footsteps. And of course I could do this on my research log also, but if I were to give this to someone else and they wanted to work on the civil war service, they’d have the information right there in the footnote about where I found some more detailed, so many good reasons to always cite our sources.

Diana (29m 51s):
Now let’s talk about documents that we may want to include with our report to forgiving it to someone else. And if we’re doing client work, then of course, we want to give all the documents to the client that we found, or that are mentioned in the report so that they can look at those for themselves and see what the document looks like in its entirety. A lot of times I’ll take a little screenshot of a part of a document and put that into the report, but I always like to include the entire document as well. So what I do is when I’m completely done with that report, then I go back and in the footnotes, I will put a mention, I’ll say, document one, document two, which will help the reader to go find that appropriate document.

Diana (30m 36s):
And then I save those documents separately in a separate document file, or as an appendix to the report. All at the end one big tip is to save your documents as you’re doing the research. So downloading them to a special file for that project and renaming them, having them all organized so that at the end, you don’t have to go back and find them all and download them. And especially if you’re doing client work and you are on the clock for a certain amount of hours for this project, it can be kind of disheartening at the end of a 20 hour project and you have one hour left and then you’ve got 20 documents that you have to download and to get organized, because that could take an extra two hours.

Diana (31m 19s):
So if you are working on this all the way through the project, that will help you to keep within your time frame for the project. So what you can do is every time you are researching and find a document, download it, put it in the folder and give it a descriptive file name. I talk about in blog posts and on the podcasts about how I do my final names and I do it with the year and then the name of the person, and then the place. So for instance, for this one, I would maybe say 1850 census Nancy Briscoe and the county of Arkansas, where that took place. And then that would be my descriptive file name.

Diana (32m 1s):
And you can do whatever you want. Some people put the name first and then the date, but I like it to line up in my folder as sort of a timeline. And then I can look right through and really easily see that I have all the censuses or see what records I’ve got chronologically. So that’s how I do my documents. And then when you are all done with your report, you can go through and assemble them in the order. You’ve discussed them. You’ve got them in your report is document 1, 2, 3, and so forth. Then you can rename those files with document one, document two, if you’re giving us to someone with your documents in a file, or what I like to do is copy and paste that document into a new Google doc or a new word doc.

Diana (32m 45s):
And I will bring over that image of the document and then I’ll put the citation below it and label it as document one so that the reader can have all the documents in one PDF, and then they can compare that with the report. So I’ve kind of settled on that. You know, it just depends on the project. Sometimes people will want to have the actual images of the documents in a separate file and that’s fine too. So then I just renamed them to match. So it just depends on who you’re giving the report to and what you think would work best for a specific project.

Nicole (33m 21s):
Yeah, it’s important to do those documents for the client report and hopefully for our own report to ourselves, we will have those documents saved in our own files. All right, let’s do an example from Diana’s report now about making connections and kind of discussing the possibilities of future research suggested by the records. This is a really important part of the report for research and progress, because it shows what you can do next. Here’s an example by the 1860 census, the nuclear family of John and Susanna Briscoe had broken up and a ten-year-old Nancy Briscoe Frazier is found living in a household of another Nancy Brisco aged 53, who is Nancy Briscoe, age 53.

Nicole (34m 6s):
And is this the correct record for Nancy Briscoe age 10 family lore has it that Nancy’s mother Susanna died during the civil war and that the family lived near the side of the pier Ridge battlefield in Benton county, Arkansas, if Susanna didn’t die until the civil war, she would be living in 1860 researching Nancy Briscoe, age 53, and the head of household in 1860, discovered a possible 1850 census listing for her with a husband of another John Briscoe in Newton county, Arkansas. This family also includes an Isaac and Nancy Briscoe, and it is shown in table for further research in probate tax and land records of Newton county. Arkansas could reveal more about the family of John and Nancy Briscoe, a numerated in 1850.

Nicole (34m 51s):
So in the report, this information was found that could have been another family. So it brought up some new ideas for future research to figure out who these people were, maybe separate them from our research subject or decide that they were the same people,

Diana (35m 6s):
Right? And that was actually the subject of a whole different project and report. And I did find that they were indeed another family. There were two Nancy Briscoes very much the same age. And of course their identities had gotten merged and they had the same father of John Briscoe, but the mother’s name was different. And this happens so much in our research and is something that we need to always be on the lookout for that we may not have the right person. So something just to be thinking about now, after we have put everything into the report, Rican summarize, and one of the things we can do is to write this in narrative form, or maybe we want to bullet point the key items to make it easy for the reader.

Diana (35m 50s):
To remember everything we discussed, the whole idea of the conclusion is to lead the reader through the key points again, and we don’t need citations. Everything’s been fully cited in the report and it gives us an opportunity to help the reader to understand what they just read their mind might be kind of swimming with all the things we’ve presented. And so now we can put it into a nice conclusion that brings it all together for them. And I like to frame this positively, you may do a project for yourself or for your client that you had all negative findings. If you’re working on a brick wall, you might find that you might be searching for the death date of an ancestor.

Diana (36m 31s):
And every single thing that you searched came up with nothing. So how can you frame something like that positively? Well, you can say this research was successful in determining that there was no record created for the death of John Smith. And then you have to say something like further research could explore this avenue. If there was something that came to mind, if you feel like there really is no record, then you can leave it and say, okay, this is the best we have at this point. And you can move on to a new project. Often I will have a project like this from a client that just wants to know, have we searched everything possible to find this record?

Diana (37m 14s):
And if we search and we still don’t find it, then sometimes they will just say, okay, let’s just move on. And sometimes we have to just move on with our research. And so this gives us a chance in our conclusion to either say, okay, we’ve done enough here. Let’s move on. Or there’s a lot more that we can do next. So I really like to try to think of a way to make this positive, whatever research we did, whether it was negative findings or that we found a lot of good information. Now, one of the questions we do get from our study group people or from our Facebook group is about the results summary and the conclusion, how are those different?

Diana (37m 55s):
So often I will do for my client work a summary of results that I put right at the beginning so that the client can quickly scan through and see what was found. Because quite honestly, that’s what they’re going to do with the body of the report anyway, is to skim through and see what was found. So if you just put that at the beginning, it makes it easy for them, and then they can read the entire report. So you don’t create this until you’ve written the whole report. And what I will do is I’ll open up my report on one of my monitors and then another document on my other monitor. And I’ll just go through the report and I will summarize the findings and I’ll start an action for black search.

Diana (38m 37s):
The census for Nancy Briscoe discovered to Nancy Briscoes in 1860, something like that. And it makes it really easy to create that after the reports written, by having two windows, two monitors open and quickly summarizing, and then I’ll just copy and paste that summary right at the beginning of the report. So just a little tip if you are working with clients and wanting to find quick and easy ways to do that summary now, would you want to do a summary of results for yourself? Well, I would argue, yes. That could be very helpful because if you are looking at your past research, you might want to just really quickly remember what’s in that report as well, rather than having to read through, you know, a 20 page report.

Diana (39m 25s):
So hopefully that kind of clears up that question kind of seems like you’re doing a lot of repetition. If you have that summary of findings and then you have the discussion of the records and then you have a conclusion at the end, but each one has its own purpose and can be used in a slightly different way. And I think there’s value in repetition in really understanding what was found. Something to think about.

Nicole (39m 50s):
That is a good idea. I think it’s nice to have that summary for ourselves and for others. So after the summary of findings and the conclusion, we need to have a list of future research suggestions. So at the end of a research session, we may decide that there’s more things we can do, additional research on van club or more records to be found, or we might decide that we’ve done reasonably exhaustive research and we’ve completed the research, or maybe there’s nothing left to do. We’ve exhausted every other avenue, whatever you are coming to, you can let the client know most of our research that we’ve done. There’s always something more to be done.

Nicole (40m 31s):
And so these go in the future research suggestions. So this helps you or the client note where you should begin the next time you work on this project. It also gives clients a reason to hire you again in the future because you’re showing them what you could do to continue to find the answer. The best way to do a research suggestion list is to list specific record collections that you will search. So from Diana’s report, here’s some examples of future research research. The John Briscoe, family of Newton county Arkansas listed on the 1850 census discover the connection to Nancy Briscoe, age 53 on the 1860 census of Newton county, Arkansas search the probate land and court records of Newton county.

Nicole (41m 14s):
So that kind of goes along with that bullet above it. Okay. The next suggestion is search the 1860 census for all members of the family of Nancy Brisco found on the 1850 census of Benton county, Arkansas. So following the family forward, looking at all the siblings, and then another bullet is search records of McDonald county, Missouri for all Briscoe and Clanton connections. And then a sub bullet of that is using probate land tax and court records.

Diana (41m 44s):
So those were a little bit general. Sometimes I’ll put in really specific things like a specific record collection, but because I haven’t explored all of those different avenues and I know where to go find those records, I didn’t put in the specific collections, but if I was doing something and there was a major record type that needed to be searched, and I had discovered a great place to search for that. I’d probably want to put that in there to remind myself when I get back to that project about what I was going to do next. So I think that it’s really helpful to be specific. And if you are doing client work, it can really help the client to decide if they want to hire you again.

Diana (42m 26s):
If they see that there’s some really good collections to be searched and things to be done. So let’s talk about some tips of writing. I know writing scares a lot of people, they, but one of the things that I always teach is just to get started. You may have a mental block against writing, but just do a rough draft, sit down and say, okay, for an hour, I’m going to write, I’m just going to get this rough draft down. And then after you’ve done it, go back and work through it. I like to circle all the passive, be verbs, you know, I’ll print it out and look for things like is, are, and were, and then try to have it have more action verbs rather than so much of those passive verbs.

Diana (43m 10s):
I keep a cheat sheet of good action verbs to use things like determined, revealed search discovered, found, and the more you start writing, the easier it will come. And you’ll start just naturally writing in a way that is a little bit more action-based rather than passive based. One of the things you can do is also take out all your extra words and eliminate your trite or overused phrases. Sometimes we tend to use 10 words when five words would suffice and often you can see this really well when you’re reading it back to yourself, you can read it out loud and say, oh man, kind of wordy there.

Nicole (43m 55s):
Yeah, I’ve done that before. And one of the things that I noticed that I’ll use a lot is the same qualifier over and over, like probably this is the probable father. So I try to think of a different way to say it like likely or, you know, researching in the south. You have a lot of inferences that you’re making. So you use a lot of the same words sometimes. Yup. Another thing we can do is be consistent with the voice, whether we’re using the first person, second person or third person and Diana already discussed when it’s appropriate to do those. So just make sure you’re consistent. Another thing to do is make sure that you are using past tense when you’re about historical records. This is tricky to do because sometimes we are thinking in terms of the present tense, because that’s how we found things.

Nicole (44m 40s):
And we looked at the record or another thing that I’ve seen and that I’ve done myself is to put myself in the past and really be thinking in the past. And so then I write in the present tense because I am thinking in the terms of being there myself, what is generally accepted is to use past tense when speaking about historical events. So instead of saying in the 1850 census, Nancy is 13 years old, the family is living in blah, blah, blah. It’s generally better to just use the past tense to say, Nancy was 13 years old, the family was living, blah, blah, blah.

Nicole (45m 21s):
So that’s kind of something that you need to decide how you’re going to do and be consistent with it. If you’re jumping back and forth between past tense and present tense, that can be really confusing to breed. And it just is a little bit jumpy. So be consistent with your tents and consider using past tense. When speaking about historical events, another thing to do as you proofread is to just check for grammar and spelling and punctuation. And it’s really easy as you go through and write a report to have those kinds of grammatical errors. So proofreading and editing is a really important part of the process and then also edit for content and just see if you analyzed each source thoroughly.

Nicole (46m 1s):
Did you really explain the reasoning behind searching that particular source? Did you present the evidence clearly or did you leave out some information that would make it a little bit more easy to understand?

Diana (46m 14s):
Those are all really great ideas. One big tip is to set your writing aside for a few days and then look at it again. It’s amazing how some of those things will jump out at you and you’ll realize that you’ve made some big mistakes or that you’ve done some really great writing. I like to print out a paper copy and then get out my red pen and go through and edit it. And I especially did this when I was just starting with writing reports and really needing to analyze how I was writing and learning how to be a better writer. I found that it helped a lot to have it on paper. And if you have someone in your family who wouldn’t mind reading your report, that is very helpful.

Diana (46m 56s):
So many times I’ve had my husband read it or another researcher read it and they will catch things that I had completely skipped over. They’ll say I have no idea what you’re talking about in this paragraph. And to me it made perfect sense, but having someone else read it, it was very helpful. And finally just develop your own style. You don’t have to try to copy anyone else, just write in a way that feels comfortable to you and develop your own way of saying things and writing Jenny a logically and just write whether anybody’s ever going to read it, but you just something,

Nicole (47m 31s):
I think that’s a really good suggestion to just get started writing. And then when you want to edit your writing and learn how to make it better, you can go and read other people’s writing and just get some more ideas for how people phrase things and how they use the voice and the present or past tense. And just get more familiar with the standards for genealogical writing, by reading good journals, like the national genealogical society, quarterly or reading reports of other researchers who are your colleagues and just seeing how they do it. And this is one thing that has been really great for Diana and I, as we have learned, being able to read each other’s reports. And if you don’t have a study buddy, that you can read the report, then maybe join a study group like pro Jen or our research, like a pro study group where you can read other people’s writing and get a lot of ideas that way.

Nicole (48m 23s):
Yeah.

Diana (48m 23s):
Yes. And another good idea is to read well, like Nicole said the journals and I will sometimes highlight just specifically how they phrase things. Cause it can be kind of tricky figuring out how to succinctly write something. I know people who have their own little cheat sheet of good phrases, like I mentioned, and that’s also an idea if you’re trying to do this professionally and want to really up your game with your writing. All right. Hope you enjoyed listening to all the discussion on how I wrote my report on Nancy Briscoe. One of the things that I wanted to add was since we’ve been working a lot with DNA reports, we’ve added a limitation section at the beginning of the report.

Diana (49m 6s):
And I think this works well for documentary research as well as DNA so that we can know how many hours we set aside for the research. You know, and we’re working with clients. This is really important to say, we were limited to 20 hours of research. This is what we could do. And I think it’s a good idea to do that for ourselves too. You know, so we realized, well, I didn’t spend a hundred hours on this. This is what I did in 20 hours or 10 hours or 40 hours, whatever. And then also limitations on what records we could access. Maybe we only could access records online. Maybe we couldn’t go to the archives because of COVID closures. You know, we kind of are limited right now with some other records we can get. So it’s good to put those at the beginning of the report.

Diana (49m 50s):
And then we’ve really learned through working with so many people in our study groups that you need to write as you go. It’s not very fun to do all of your research and then have to sit down and write it all up at once. So one of the things that we really recommend is after you had done your timeline and your locality guide, so you have a good foundation of what you know, and the area you’re researching to write up your background information, right? Then you can do that in narrative or in a table form, you know, for your information that was known at the beginning of the project. But this really helps you clarify your starting point information.

Diana (50m 31s):
And often as you’re writing it out, you get a few more aha moments that can help you. And then once you’ve got that written out, then you can go ahead and start following your research plan. What I like to do is as I’m following my research plan, put in my research log as I’m researching really good notes. So as I’m looking at that record, I will basically do an abstract. But then in my comment cell, I will often write down all my thoughts. And if you get in the habit of really writing that out, well, sometimes you can just copy that right into your report. So that’s a good place to write your thoughts as you are researching, that can be translated over to your report.

Nicole (51m 12s):
Absolutely. There’s a lot of things that you can write before you correlate and assemble everything like analysis of that record, just looking at it and saying, it appears that this is information that was provided by an eye witness. And the person was probably at the event that they’re reporting about and it looks to be quality information. Then later when you correlate everything you can talk about, you know, if there’s conflicts and anything is not going together correctly and maybe analyze and correlate as you write the final report right

Diana (51m 44s):
Now, a question we often get is how much time should we spend on the writing versus the research. And I think a really good rule of thumb is half on the research and half on the writing, especially when you’re just starting out writing, you might actually end up doing one third research and two thirds writing. If it takes you longer to get your ideas into writing. And I would always recommend to start writing sooner rather than later. Sometimes we were attempted just to keep researching, trying to find the Alyssa of record going and going and going with the research. But if you can discipline yourself to stop and write up what you have found so far, often that can help you to make those connections that might lead you in a better direction for the research.

Diana (52m 30s):
So don’t research too many hours before you start writing something. I think if you experiment with that, you’ll find that that may be will help you be more efficient in your research process.

Nicole (52m 43s):
Yeah. And it’s hard sometimes to start writing when you feel like you haven’t found anything. But usually when I start writing, then I realize, oh, there’s this thing I just need to check. And then it leads me to a focused research rather than just, oh, I finished my research plan. Didn’t find anything. I’m just gonna search random websites now and see if I can hurry and find something. So writing really is a good way to really lead you in the right direction.

Diana (53m 10s):
Yeah, it is. And I mentioned the last episode that I’ve been returning to this McKinsey project that I had to let go for a whole month, which is kind of a long time after you’ve done the research and you’ve done so many other things since then, but I had written up where I was to that point. And I’m so glad because as I read through it, it helped me just remember all the things I had thought about. And I had made some notes for myself about what I needed to write next. If I have to let a project go for a bit right in the report, I’ll say next talk about this and this and this. And that’s so helpful. So writing that report and keeping all of that together is a great way. If you have to put your research away for a little bit, that combined with your research log, then you can just pull it back out.

Diana (53m 51s):
And none of your time is wasted.

Nicole (53m 54s):
We’re not wasting time and our research. And we really hope that all of you listening can do the same to be more efficient, to make more progress and to find the answers you’re looking for. And that’s what this whole process and series has been about is using an effective process to help you make progress. So good luck with that. All right.

Diana (54m 12s):
And everyone, if you’ve never written anything for your research, I challenge you to go write something this week and see what it’s like to write about your research. I think you might find it’s really fun. So good luck. All

Nicole (54m 24s):
Right. Bye. Bye.

Diana (54m 25s):
Bye.

Nicole (54m 27s):
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.