RLP 223: Tracking Research Projects in Airtable

pNicole (1s):
This is research Like a Pro episode 223 tracking projects in air table. 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 (43s):
Hi everybody. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (45s):
Hi Nicole. How are you today?

Nicole (47s):
I’m really good. I am making some progress on my portfolio, feeling really confident and I also have been doing my locality guide for the study group. How about you?

Diana (56s):
I’ve been doing mine too and I’m actually doing two because of course I have two different counties and they’re so different. One is Morgan County, Missouri, which has a lot of records. The other is Isard County, Arkansas, which is a severely burned county with no records in the era that I’m researching and so I’m going to be resorting to some other jurisdictions and trying to figure out what’s available. So it’s been good doing the locality guide, learning about both counties.

Nicole (1m 26s):
It’s so disappointing when you have a burned county and I am doing two locality guides too. One is an area that I’ve done a lot of research in FA year County Virginia, and the other is I think Apparent County. I did kind of the boundary changes over time for VA year and I believe part of it came from Prince William County. It was created from that. So there’s kind of a lot of parent counties going back in time in the 17 hundreds in Virginia. All the counties changed a lot, at least in this area. So I’ve been really trying to pay attention to how that works out and, and anyways, so Prince William County is quite different than Faar County and they have different resources and I was thinking it would be really similar, but it’s just different.

Nicole (2m 13s):
So they lost some records too and Faar has more records.

Diana (2m 20s):
Interesting.

Nicole (2m 21s):
And then Prince William has some like interesting different record types. And I also found a vestry book that was for one of the parishes that covered like part of FA and part of Prince William and then the Hamilton Parish. Apparently I read on one of the websites that that vestry book was being used by the county clerks for scrap paper.

Diana (2m 44s):
Oh my goodness. Does

Nicole (2m 45s):
Not remain anymore. Oh

Diana (2m 47s):
My goodness. No, think

Nicole (2m 49s):
About rolling it into cigars or something.

Diana (2m 51s):
Oh, I love the vestry books. If you remember right when I was doing the Roy Research in Gloucester County, Virginia, that was a severely burnt county as well, but the vestry book survived cuz it’s you know, a different jurisdiction in the church and that is what completely, you know, laid out three generations of the early Roys was that vestry book. It was so great. That is great. And I’ve used those and other client projects as well in early Virginia finding those if they exist and your people are in them are amazing.

Nicole (3m 25s):
I did find one person, I’m doing a John West research project for the study group trying to find his parents and all I know is that he arrived in Faar County in 1787 as an adult and we’re trying to trace him back and John West named his first son William West. So I have the hypothesis that his father’s name might be William West. Well, in that vestry book there was a William West poor man who died and somebody, one of the overseers of the poor paid for his burial and that’s like the only thing about him in there.

Diana (3m 58s):
Interesting.

Nicole (3m 59s):
I just wonder if the reason we can’t find John West’s father is that he was a poor man who there are no records except for that about him.

Diana (4m 6s):
That very well could be.

Nicole (4m 8s):
How many people are out there like that in the 17 hundreds who there’s just no record?

Diana (4m 12s):
Well one of the families I was tracing, they were in all the records as vestry man and you know, leaders of the community and such. And then the father died and then the mother and the children were on the poor records for the rest of the time. And then my hypothesis was one of those children was the ancestor that moved west. So it can give you a lot of context about what maybe happened with the family. So Wow, how exciting that you found out one little reference.

Nicole (4m 40s):
Yeah, and who knows if he’s even connected, but it’s at least it’s something.

Diana (4m 44s):
It’s something it puts him in that county at that time, you know? Yeah, that’s, that is something to pin somebody to a place and time, so that’s great.

Nicole (4m 54s):
Even if I can’t even identify who he was, but at least he’s a name that you know seems their name.

Diana (4m 59s):
Yeah, that’s great. Well we’re having a lot of fun working on our projects, aren’t we?

Nicole (5m 3s):
Yeah. Awesome. It’s so interesting to go through the research like a pro process again after having taught it so much. And one of the things we always teach with locality guides is to, when you find a new resource to add to your list of resources to possibly search that you don’t go down a rabbit hole and start searching in it. Well that is so difficult to do because immediately I’m like, oh, well I’m just going to quickly search this vestry book for a west cause like the ocr I can just quickly, Yeah. So it’s challenging and then I was thinking like, why is it that I wanna do that and is it more efficient or not?

Nicole (5m 43s):
And I realized it really is not more efficient to do that because then as soon as I do the search, I have to research, log it, write a citation and do all these things and I was like, I hadn’t even prioritized that search as one that would be helpful in this this instance I did find something that is helpful, but you know, it’s better to, yeah, learn what’s there, then make your research plan and then start with the prioritized collections first so that you’re not wasting time and ones that aren’t helpful.

Diana (6m 11s):
And I think wasting time is the big key there because you can waste a lot of time and because you feel like you’re not really doing real research or just exploring it, you can just get lost in the records for

Nicole (6m 20s):
Really can hours.

Diana (6m 22s):
Yeah. All right, well let’s do some announcements then we’ll get to our topic of the day, which is going to be super fun. So we’re excited that we have our DNA study group registration beginning December 1st. That’s coming up in just two months, I can’t believe it. And that study group will be February 1st, 2023 to May 10th and we’ll have three break weeks in there. So if you’re interested in joining us, put that on your calendar to register and check out being a peer group leader. That’s a really great experience and the applications on the website. And then as always, join our newsletter for any coupons we have going on for our courses.

Nicole (7m 0s):
Yeah, we usually have some Black Friday sales, so stay tuned for those coming up in November. I was just thinking what I will do for the DNA study group is going to be continuing this west research because I’ve already got the foundation set when I did the Joanna West research project earlier this year and I’ve got all these test takers and now I’m doing this documentary research for this study group and there’s a Y DNA sample that’s been submitted to the big Y for the west line through one of my cousins who’s been sharing that with me. And so I asked him, can I have access to look at that stuff? And so we’re working together on that and I’m thinking I’ll just wait on that DNA until the next study group and just focus on the documentary research right now.

Diana (7m 45s):
You know what, I think that’s a great idea and I’m kind of doing that with my project too. I’m planning on continuing my client project to the DNA and adding DNA evidence then I think that works really well to set a good foundation with the documents and then add the dna.

Nicole (8m 1s):
Absolutely. It’s just going back to how research and phases is such a successful way to do things, you know, like not feeling like you have to do it all at once. You can chunk it out and spend some time just focusing on documentary and then see what that points to as far as like, oh now I can do a targeted test taker on this Y DNA line, you know? Right. To supplement what I already have for the Y DNA and see what if it matches.

Diana (8m 28s):
Yeah, it just, it weaves back and forth so much.

Nicole (8m 31s):
Well, speaking of doing projects in phases, we are talking today about keeping track of all the projects you’ve done.

Diana (8m 39s):
Yes.

Nicole (8m 40s):
So do you, you listeners have a lot of research logs and reports and other tools for your ancestors that represent months or years of research. I know I do and Diana does. Do you ever forget that you’ve created a tool such as a timeline only to recreate it? Diana recently set up an air table base to track her research projects and these timelines and research logs that she’s made. So today we’re going to talk about this air table base and share how you can do the same thing for your research. So why would you want to do this? Tracking your research projects can be super helpful, especially if you have put aside some research for a time and you may not remember exactly what you’ve done, what you’ve completed, you know, how many reports have you done on this line?

Nicole (9m 26s):
You don’t want to repeat a research log or a timeline that you’ve already made. And we’ve done this before, it’s kind of funny. Oh yeah, I already have this exact timeline that I just made. Whoops. So you know, you can corral links to the ancestor from Google Drive, links to research logs and a note showing their research status. You can put that all into an air table base and then grouping and sorting within the base will show us which ancestor needs a little love in the way of more research.

Diana (9m 55s):
Yeah, I had been wanting to do something like this for a long time. What really pushed me to it was when I started this client research project and I was seriously starting to recreate a research timeline on Clumsy Kline and then I thought, I wonder if I’ve already done some of this work. Went to my Google Drive folder for her and found a complete research log that I had done. And so yeah, I decided I needed to have some way to put all of this into air table. And so what I did was I just created an air table base from scratch just using their basic base and I thought about all the information I would really like to capture. I might change it as I’m going, but for right now I’m pretty happy with it.

Diana (10m 37s):
And I did put it out there on Air Table Universe. So the blog post I wrote about this called Tracking Projects and Air Table has a link to that on Air Table universe. So you can go to that, you can explore the base I created and you can copy it and then you can make it your own. You can add whatever you want or delete whatever you don’t like. But I thought it would be fun to kind of talk through what I did for that and see if you’d like to do something similar. So I decided to have one base for my paternal line and one for my maternal because they’re very different. You know, I’ve said before my, my paternal lines all out of the south, my maternal line is England and Denmark and they just don’t mix.

Diana (11m 20s):
So I felt like I just wanted to have two separate ones. What do you think about that, Nicole?

Nicole (11m 25s):
I think that’s a great idea. And sometimes we have different ways of separating our research in our minds. Like my husband’s line and then my grandpa elders line, you know, whatever makes sense to you. Yeah, it’s a good idea. And often you’ll have overlapping research projects, so it makes sense that if you have any overlapping ones that you’d wanna put them all on the same base.

Diana (11m 47s):
Right. Which is why I kind of thought the, just dividing it into paternal maternal for my research works really well. So then I had to think of what tables I wanted to have within the base and I wanted to keep it fairly simple. So I titled these ancestral research, Research status and Projects. So we’ll go through each one of those and discuss, you know, what’s there. And again, you can change anything you don’t like if you decide to do something like this for yourself. So the very first field, and remember a field is like a column. The first field is where I put the full name of the ancestor and I use the Maita name for women since our women can have many, many different surnames as they go through multiple marriages.

Diana (12m 34s):
And then I like to have the dates. I am doing the birth and death dates and even if I don’t know them, I’ll estimate them for instance, like 1850 to 1898. But if I do have the full date, I put that there and I just did that as a text filled, I didn’t try to do it as a date field because I wanted to put the range just so I would know, kind of have an idea. And then I put the on and topple number. So if you don’t know what that is, you can read about that. It’s how you number your pedigree with you as number one, your father’s, number two, your mother, number three. And as you keep going back, just picture that fan chart starting on the left and continuing the numbering.

Diana (13m 16s):
So I did that because I’m also working with an ancestral tree and DNA painter and that gives you your on and tole numbers. And so it was really easy for me to see them and I, I just decided I would do that to keep track of who these people are on my tree.

Nicole (13m 31s):
Oh great. I love the on and tole number. And it’s super fun that you’re correlating that with your ancestral tree because you’re painting the levels right, of yeah. How much you’ve researched them.

Diana (13m 41s):
Exactly. And then I did localities and I put local as a multiple select field so I could put as many localities I wanted for an ancestor, but I’m for sure doing birth and death localities then if there’s like a migration pattern or a place they live that I think is important to remember. I put that in there as well because I can sort by locality and see who all is living in, you know, Lubbock County, Texas or Love County Oklahoma. So I just thought that might be a good way to keep track of where these people were all living. And then I have the research status, which is a single select field and that one is where you are in your research and we’ll talk all about that in a minute.

Diana (14m 28s):
But that is giving me a way to explain where I’m at. Have I done any research on them? Have I met the gps? Have I written a report? You know, that type of a thing so I can really see where I’m at. And then I have some notes after I decided the status, I decided the status after just looking through my ancestry tree or family search or what I have in my folder for them. And then I really realized, wow, I’m my dad. I don’t even have his World War II records completed, or he was a member of an organization in college and you know, maybe there’s more records I can get. And I haven’t written a sore side of biography of him either. So I made some notes about what I need to do and then I have a field where you put in the URL and I have a link to my Google Drive folder for each person.

Diana (15m 17s):
And then I have a link to any research log I’ve done on them. And then I have a project filled and this is a link filled and this one takes me to the project table. And this is what I was really excited to figure out because sometimes we’ve done multiple projects on a person. Right, Just like you’re talking about phases. Yeah. You know, and that’s where you start forgetting how many projects have I done on this person. And so that is where I will be putting in projects and you can put as many in as you’ve done. And then each project shows up in the project table and you can talk about each project. And then I decided I wanted to have a link or URL to family search page and the ancestry page for each person.

Diana (16m 4s):
Nice. Yeah. So can you think of anything else I should have added?

Nicole (16m 9s):
No, I’m just thinking about how I wanna do this for all my research projects. So this is really cool. I love the link to the Google Drive folder. That’s super helpful.

Diana (16m 18s):
Oh, I know, right? And then right to your research log. So many times I am working and I just think, oh I, where’s the research log for that? I wanna look really quickly and and see something and then I have to go find it. So I think this is gonna make my research more efficient.

Nicole (16m 34s):
Yeah, I need to go into your paternal air table base and add the projects that I’ve done on the side of the family.

Diana (16m 40s):
I know I’m super excited. So I have shared, shared this with Nicole so we can collaborate on it and I think that’ll be great because you know, we both have taken kind of specific lines of the family. It’s gonna be fun to collaborate with this.

Nicole (16m 55s):
Yeah, it’s interesting how it’s just kind of worked out where I have done some research on that Welch side and and you’ve kind of focused on the Boyton and Eisenhower, but yeah, I did some Eisenhower too. It’s just fun to work together.

Diana (17m 10s):
It is fun. It’s really fun. Well and it was interesting because as I was doing the status, I started with my dad and I got down to, I did all my great grandparents I did to that level and then one set of great great grandparents. So I have got some projects put in there, but most of them are still at just this level three, meaning I know their occupation, I know their residents, I know their children and spouses, but I haven’t written anything about them and I haven’t filled in additional details. I haven’t done a biography. So it makes me see that wow, I have a lot of work to do. But there was one person, Dora Algae, who she gets a five that I met the GPS because she was the subject of my accreditation project, my four generation project.

Diana (17m 59s):
And so I really did write, you know, I met the GPS and I’ve written up a report, but I don’t have the top level of that source side of biography with historical context done for her. So it’s been fun just to see where I’m at with my research.

Nicole (18m 15s):
Yeah, one thing Yvette put in her article about this level of challenge was that she was surprised to see that she hadn’t gotten to the top level with as many of her ancestors as she thought.

Diana (18m 27s):
I think all of us are going to realize that. So you know, maybe you can kind of tell us more about Yvette’s level of challenge and the research status table

Nicole (18m 37s):
Before I do that, it’s just challenging when you are researching for other people to keep up on your own family. So we always say this, but it’s such a delight to do research projects within our study group because we work on our own families for those.

Diana (18m 53s):
It’s so true. And as I get older I’m just like, oh, I don’t have years and years and years left. I mean I still have a lot of time left I’m hoping, but you know when, when you’re in your twenties and thirties you just feel like you’ve got so much time to do all this research and then as you get older you’re like, oh man, I gotta hurry and get this done.

Nicole (19m 13s):
Right. And it’s good to have goals and that’s what I like about Yvette Hoyt Inc’s article six Levels of Ancestral Profiles, the Level Up Challenge because it really gives us some goals to think about like what I wanna have for each of my ancestors. Do I want to have just some facts for them in my tree or do I want to have a source sided biography, which is the highest level. And below that, level five you mentioned was having a piece of writing that meets the genealogical proof standard about them. It’s great. She identifies six levels of research and then in the research status table in this air table base, those are the levels of research or research status for the ancestor.

Nicole (19m 54s):
So on the ancestral research tab it has the ancestor name and their dates and their localities, and then it has the research status. And you can select 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or six. And the research status is are for level one that you just know their names only and they’re named in some record, but you don’t know their birth marriage or death. So that would be like the lowest level. Well I guess zero would be you don’t know their names at all. We all have zeros too.

Diana (20m 22s):
They don’t get a place, No,

Nicole (20m 24s):
They’re not even in the table base cause we don’t know their name. And then level two is vital statistics, birth, marriage, and death. So you have done research and vital records and you have those birth marriage and death dates in places or at least some of them. And then level three you have kind of beyond that you have their occupations, maybe you have where they lived, their residents, you know their children’s names and their spouses. And so you know, several key points of information. And then if you’re at level four, you have even more of that because you have land records, you have military service if applicable, you have their religion. So you have filled in some of those additional biographical details about their life.

Nicole (21m 4s):
And then level five is that you have met the genealogical proof standard for them and their identity and relationships. And so you will have met the five parts of the gps, which are number one reasonably exhaustive research. And so you’ve checked all the records you can think of for their life and you have source citations, you have analyzed and correlated the evidence, you’ve resolved any conflicts and you have a written conclusion. And that can be done in a report, a proof argument, or you could put that into their biography I guess, which is level six. And so level six is that you have a sore sided family history or biography with historical context. And that I think is such a good goal to have for each of our ancestors to have that written.

Nicole (21m 50s):
And you know, we might not fully check every single record that exists for them, but we have at least tried to think of all the ones that we could get. Like you were saying with grandpa, you know, there’s some additional record sets that you wanna check for him that you haven’t, that you know are probably out there you just haven’t gotten. So we try to do that and then we write it up in a biography.

Diana (22m 15s):
Yeah, it was really fun to put this together and I’ll publicly thank youve, she gave me permission to use these levels in the air table base and we, I give her credit there, so when you see it, you can have a link to her actual blog post where she wrote about it in January of 2021. But she was using Dutch research for her record checklist. And so I also include a record checklist in this research status table. And I changed it to reflect United States research. So if you are researching in England or Germany or Canada and you’ve got a different set of records that you use, you know, of course you could go in and change that. But I wanted it to reflect the records that I typically use and what I should be checking Oh for all my Southern people.

Nicole (23m 0s):
Well that’s kind of nice to have a little checklist like okay, level two I need to look for birth certificate, a marriage record and a death record. Burial or obituary. Yeah, for those vitals. And then for level three, this is going to be like census records and tax records. So yeah, that’s cool. And

Diana (23m 19s):
You know, maybe you wanna adjust your level three and level four, but level three was knowing occupations, residents, children and spouses. And those were kind of the main records we used for that. I did put tax records twice because I put that on level four too. We love tax records, don’t we? And actually, you know, maybe some of the land records would also go to level three, you know, you could adjust however you see fit. But I was trying to think about what, what would work there. I might tweak that a bit.

Nicole (23m 47s):
Well it’s just good to think about, you know, the different things and some of the things in the level four are a little harder to access. Like court records are not usually indexed and so you really do have to dig a little bit deeper to get to level four.

Diana (23m 59s):
Exactly, exactly. It’s

Nicole (24m 0s):
A game, you know?

Diana (24m 2s):
Yeah, I’m pretty, I’m pretty excited about this. It’s one of those things I’ve been wanting to do for a long time and to finally get it done feels so good.

Nicole (24m 10s):
Yeah, we have talked about wanting to track different projects and like have a place to just put that information. Like okay, I did a project on this and the one you were saying about Clumsy Kline, you’d had done that a long time ago in a different place. Like you were using research ties for that research log, right?

Diana (24m 26s):
Yes. I was doing that in I believe 2016 or 2017. I had completely forgotten I had done all that research. It was crazy.

Nicole (24m 34s):
Yeah. And if you’re not tracking it or you know checking research ties, then you wouldn’t remember.

Diana (24m 40s):
Right. And I had discontinued using that, but you know, it was great because research Tide generated a nice Excel spreadsheet for me that I could then transfer into Airtable. So it was pretty sweet. That’s very happy when I discovered I had all that research done.

Nicole (24m 55s):
Yeah, that’s great. That’s fantastic.

Diana (24m 58s):
Oh, so funny. Well let’s talk about the final table and that’s the projects one. And so this is a linked field in the first table where I put in the ancestor and their dates and their research status, you’ll come to projects, which is a linked field and you can put as many projects as you’ve done on an ancestor in that field. And then they show up automatically in the projects table. And the project name will be whatever you’ve named it in the original ancestral research. And then I put several different fields here. So I wanted to track the date. So let’s just go through one of the projects. Let’s do the project I did on Eliza and Eisenhower.

Diana (25m 41s):
So that was April, 2020. So then I have a linked field for ancestors and this one included Eli and Eisenhower and William Henderson. So that will show up in both of their ancestral research lines on the first table that I have this project. And so the ancestors are linked to the projects in ancestral research.

Nicole (26m 5s):
That’s great because then you can link it to whoever you mentioned in the report. Because like I was saying earlier, the reports overlap multiple people in a family like Right, It talks about Eliza Eisenhower, her husband and her parents and her children. Like you could link it to several people.

Diana (26m 22s):
Exactly. And you only have to write the details of the project once and then link it to as many people as you want.

Nicole (26m 30s):
Yeah. So then when you go and research like Eliza and Eisenhower’s mother, you can see oh, she’s mentioned in this report. Yeah. And you could go there to gather your starting point information for the mother’s report. Right.

Diana (26m 43s):
Right. And so after the ancestors that are mentioned in the report, I have the objective whatever the objective of that specific project was and multiple select field for localities. So you can put in all the localities you want. And then I put a field for the summary, you know, what did I discover in this particular research phase? And then I have my ideas for future research, which is easy because we have a section for that in the report. Then I have a link for the research project document. And the project document is what we give you a template for in research like a pro, it’s where you put the objective and your summary of known facts and your research plan, so the document you’re working from.

Diana (27m 24s):
And then I have a link for whatever research log I used. In this case I was still using Google Sheets, so it’s a Google spreadsheet and then I have a link to the research report. And then if I have created a Lua chart, and in this case I did have a Lua chart because I’m charting out my DNA matches to each of these ancestral couples. So I thought it would be fun to put AUSA chart leak in there too, since I’ve already got that as part of my work. And then I have a field for check boxes, which I think are fun. And that’s if I have updated the family search family tree with the new information. And if I’ve updated ancestry tree with the new information from that project.

Diana (28m 7s):
So for Eliza, I hadn’t updated it and I didn’t realize I hadn’t, so I can’t check that box. So again, it gives me kind of a to-do list.

Nicole (28m 15s):
It does give you a to-do list and it’s really nice to just copy and paste those future research suggestions right into the base.

Diana (28m 22s):
It really is. And that’s the thing I do like about air table is you can use that field where you can put in, you know, long text and you can have bullet points, you can have bold, you can have aals, you know, all sorts of different things to help you see what you want to do next. And you can expand it and, and read, put as much as much text as you want in there. So it’s nice.

Nicole (28m 46s):
One thought I had was, you know, how do you name your research project and I noticed that you have just given it a date and a name in the name section. So like Eli, how are April, 2020? And that’s interesting because that’s kind of how we name our client projects. We give them a date and a name. So like yeah, the research subject plus the month and the year that we’re starting the project. And that’s always helpful because usually we work on projects within a few months time. Right. And so that’s a good idea. And then also sometimes you could just name it like whatever your focus is, like your four generation project from 2017, that was your accreditation project.

Nicole (29m 30s):
So in your mind you think of that as your four generation project

Diana (29m 34s):
And that’s what I named it. That’s exactly right.

Nicole (29m 36s):
Right. And then for a project where you’re trying to identify candidates for somebody’s father, you might just call that like John West Father candidates October, 2022. Right. Or something like that. Like there’s plenty of options, but I do like the idea of putting a date with the title of the project just so that you can kind of have it be unique from other projects.

Diana (29m 59s):
Right. And we learned that with our client work because we have folders for all of our clients and often we’ll do like two or three projects in a year for them. And you wanna make sure you’ve got those chronologically so that you are looking at those in the proper order. And I think that really stands to reason with our own research too. We can see, okay, what’s the most recent project I did on this? Or what did I discover with this one? So that’s why I’m so excited about this base because now I can go see what the objective was for that project and my summary, my future research. I have quick links to all of those key places for finding formation. Yeah,

Nicole (30m 37s):
I was thinking where could you put the link to your ancestral tree and DNA painter? And I was thinking maybe in the bass description you could put it up there and then you could have that link in the table too to be able to go Ooh, quickly to your DNA painter ancestral tree that has the different colors for the different levels so that you can see your fan chart. Isn’t it a fan chart?

Diana (30m 54s):
That’s a great idea. Yeah. You can view it a couple different ways, but I like the fan chart the best. That’s a great idea.

Nicole (31m 0s):
Cool To see the colors of your fan chart and see like, oh this branch of the family’s been a little neglected. They’re all, you know, level zero. But

Diana (31m 8s):
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. I’m sure there are other things we can think of. The other thing that I was thinking about, maybe on that ancestral research, the very first table is there could even have out of field for if the chromosomes have been painted in DNA painter. I mean, I don’t know how you would do that cause you continue to work on that, but maybe, maybe that could be levels as well. You know, I’ve painted a few, I’ve painted a lot. I don’t

Nicole (31m 36s):
Know. Ooh, that’s a good point. Have you verified that’s just like its own level, right? It’s own level for if this is a biological relationship.

Diana (31m 46s):
Oh well yeah, we could just add that to research status or

Nicole (31m 50s):
Level X dna.

Diana (31m 54s):
Maybe that would just be a checkbox on the very last one. DNA verified and it’d be a checkbox.

Nicole (31m 59s):
Right? There’s definitely different types of relationships. I mean cuz you still would wanna trace the tree of your adopted line. Yeah. You know, you’re adopted. So

Diana (32m 8s):
I think I do like that idea of maybe doing a field for genetic ancestor verified genetic ancestor, maybe it’d be what I’d call it. And then it could be a checkbox.

Nicole (32m 19s):
Yeah. Or you could add it into level five where you have met the GPS and you’ve decided whether or not they are a biological ancestor or not. But I feel like maybe it could just be level seven dna.

Diana (32m 36s):
I kind of like the idea of having it be its own separate field because I mean I have several of these that we have verified genetically, but I don’t wanna skip the biography, you know, or the GPS on them. You know what I’m saying? It would be nice if just say, Okay, I have looked at dna, have got them charted on Lisa Chart, know that they are a genetic ancestor.

Nicole (32m 58s):
Yeah. You could actually have your own table for DNA research status and then, and that could be its own field, like you were saying. And there are different levels, like for the dna you have seen some matches who seem to verify it. And then in the next level up from that would be you verified the parent child links for those matches. You’ve written a proof argument for that incorporates dna.

Diana (33m 23s):
Oh, that’s a fun idea. Yeah. Well maybe we’ll have to do an update to this blog post after we’ve added a added DNA ailment. That’s an awesome idea.

Nicole (33m 32s):
Yeah. We’ll have to keep brainstorming the different levels, but But you know how it is. Yeah. Where you, you know, you haven’t like done the work to finalize your proof for a person as far as proving them with dna, but you’ve seen the matches that are there and you, you kind of like know that after you do the work it’ll probably be verified, but you just haven’t done the work yet.

Diana (33m 53s):
Yes. I like that. That is great. I think we definitely need a separate field for DNA status. That’s a great idea.

Nicole (34m 1s):
Okay. That’ll be a future post.

Diana (34m 4s):
That will be a future update.

Nicole (34m 6s):
Well, thanks for sharing your air table base for tracking research projects on your ancestors, and I’m excited to go in and add the research I’ve done to our Schultz line. And this is just so fun. I hope that everyone will gain some value from thinking about how to organize all of the work you’ve done in your family history and possibly using an air table base for this. And Diana has made her air table base available as a template on her air table universe page, which we will link to in the show notes so that you can go and make a copy of the template and delete out the example data and just put in your own projects.

Diana (34m 41s):
Yeah. I hope you all are inspired to start tracking your projects. And if you haven’t started doing formal projects, I hope you will do that because it is an amazing way to make progress on your family history.

Nicole (34m 54s):
Yeah, give yourself a report and a deadline that you need to get done in a couple months.

Diana (34m 59s):
All right. Well everyone have a great week. We’ll talk to you next time. All

Nicole (35m 3s):
Right. We’ll talk to you again next week. 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.