RLP 232: Review of The Family Tree Problem Solver

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like A Pro, episode 232 The Family Tree Problem Solver. 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 everyone. Welcome to Research like a Pro.

Diana (46s):
Hi. Nicole. How are you today?

Nicole (48s):
I’m doing well. I just finished an interesting book. Have you heard of the book Ribbons of Scarlet?

Diana (54s):
No. Tell me about it.

Nicole (55s):
It’s really neat. The subtitle is A Novel of the French Revolution Women. And it’s written by several New York Times bestselling authors including Kate Quinn and Stephanie Dray and several others. And. It’s really cool they they tell the story of the French Revolution through the eyes of six different women. They use these women’s diaries and letters to kind of tell the story from different perspectives and I just loved it. It was fascinating. I ended up listening to it on the Libby app, which is like the app that a lot of libraries use. Do you have that app?

Diana (1m 33s):
Yes, I do and I’m always listening to a book, so I’ll add that to my list. I’ve love that idea. Rezo Scarlet, I haven’t read anything about the French Revolution for a long time, but one of my all time favorite books is Charles Dickens of Two Cities. I remember reading that in high school and just loved it. So good. Yeah, well I’ve been listening to a ton of books too and reading. I’m always reading books and listening and one that I finished reading was called The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman and she’s a historical fiction writer and this was really interesting. It was about the period of time in Israel after the Romans had pretty much destroyed Jerusalem, so about 75 ad.

Diana (2m 18s):
And the Jewish people that had still survived have kind of all made their way to Masada, which is that Hill Rising straight up by the Dead Sea and they were all living on top of it. And, it tells a story of these three women that make it to Masada and their story and then you know how eventually the Romans did destroy everyone, so it’s got some hard things And it cuz it was a difficult time in history. But I loved it because when I was in Israel and study abroad, we actually went to Masada and I have told the story I think to you about how we went. We drove the bus up the backside of it, which is just like a long ramp, which is what the Romans built to get to the people.

Diana (3m 1s):
And then we walked down the serpentine path, which is basically this little path that snakes back and forth and has very steep drop off and you know that I don’t really love heights. And so it was a pretty terrifying walk for me down the serpentine path. But I had two friends that walked with me very slowly and talked to me so that I could make it all the way down. So, so the whole time that I’m reading the book I am just envisioning that place and going, oh man, that was an interesting experience. Funny. So anyway, love books. We love our books. So

Nicole (3m 34s):
We Yeah, I remember you telling me that story about being afraid walking down that hill when I was younger.

Diana (3m 40s):
Yes. I have a picture of myself with my friend at the very bottom and we have our arms raised in victory that we did it.

Nicole (3m 48s):
Well that’s interesting. I’m gonna have to put Dovekeepers on my list of of books to read because I haven’t read a book said in Ancient Israel like that And, it sounds fascinating.

Diana (3m 56s):
It is. and I love books where the author has just researched so much into the history and puts in all these details and when you go to do some fat checking you find out, oh yeah, that really was, you know how that was. And of course it’s fictionalized so you know, you take some things with a grain of salt. But I think a really good historical fiction author does their homework and just brings to life that era in a fun way.

Nicole (4m 21s):
Absolutely. Well our announcements are that Registration is ongoing for our research. Like a Pro at DNA study group that begins February 1st. There are a few spots left. Please join us if you are interested in working through a project and finishing up with a report. It’s so gratifying to do that. Please join our newsletter to receive notifications of our blog posts and new podcast episodes and any coupons or sales that we have. Also, we’ve been working on our Roots Tech syllabus, handouts and things and Roots Tech is going to be in person and virtual. The virtual option is free and the in-person option is I think $98.

Nicole (5m 4s):
So we’d love to see you there at Roots Tech. We’ll have a booth for family lock it So, we can see you there. And we’ll also be presenting several classes. I am actually going to be doing a workshop on Airtable, so if you’ve been thinking you’ve wanted to try using it but you haven’t tested it out yet, then maybe you would wanna come to my workshop. Anyways, we’re excited for Roots Tech.

Diana (5m 23s):
Yeah, it’s coming fast. We are excited. It’ll be really fun to be in person and the Salt Palace is a fun venue and we’re excited to see what Roots Tech comes up with for all of their big events. And to see people in Expo Hall, it’s gonna be great.

Nicole (5m 39s):
Well, today we get to talk about a book that has to do with overcoming challenges in your research. So if you’ve had any challenges like people with the same name pre 1850 research burned counties, then you might wanna check out the classic book by Marsha Hoffman Rising The Family Tree Problem Solver. It’s on its third edition. I have one of the earlier additions on my Kindle, so I like to read that sometimes when I’m waiting in a doctor’s office or hanging out with my phone, I have the Kindle app on there. It’s great to have a book like this that you can browse through and study and I also have the hard copy of it.

Nicole (6m 21s):
Let’s do some background of the book. Marsha Hoffman Rising gave her first lecture on problem solving in 1984. And this is from the introduction, it says, over the next several decades she continued to be challenged and fascinated by the fun frustrations and rewards of Genealogy. In her time as a researcher, she discovered many techniques, tools, and methods for solving Genealogy problems. In 2005, she compiled them into The Family Tree Problem Solver, a collection of her strategies that has helped thousands of Genealogy researchers. And this was published by Family Tree Books associated with Family Tree Magazine. The book includes a lot of pictures and little research tips and quizzes to test your knowledge and a lot of examples.

Nicole (7m 8s):
So if you’ve struggled with using some more difficult records such as court or land records, the chapters on those define a lot of terms and explain techniques for finding and using them to your advantage. And Ms. Rising also directs the readers to additional books and articles for further study such as Locating Your Roots, discover Your Ancestors Using Land Records by Pat Hatcher. So it’s a Really great place to start learning about how to solve these difficult cases.

Diana (7m 38s):
Right. and I would recommend reading it straight through with a highlighter and making notes in the margins, putting sticky notes in places that really speak to you. And then I love what you said Nicole, that you have it on your Kindle and you just pick it up and read something while you’re waiting. That’s kind of how I feel now that I’ve finished it. I just finished reading the entire book straight through and now I’m thinking, oh I just wanna keep getting some of these nuggets out of here so it’s on my shelf of course. and I will continue to refer to it and get more ideas, but that’s a great idea to just use it as a refresher every so often. Love that.

Diana (8m 19s):
Well the about the author page at the end of the book explains that Ms. Rising specialized in researching early Ozark families of Southwest Missouri. So that was really fun for me because as I was reading through the book, I kept seeing these examples that just spoke to me because I know exactly how difficult research in this area can be. And so I was so curious to see what new techniques I could learn. and I have done a lot of the techniques she talked about, but there were some things that I thought, oh, that is a good approach. And one of the things that’s so great about the book is it’s just approachable and practical.

Diana (8m 60s):
It’s easy to read, it’s fun to read. You don’t get bogged down in it. So I highly recommend it. and I really love the examples. you know, sometimes we just need to read a good case study. And this is just packed of little mini case studies illustrating the concepts. The book was Originally published in 2005 and then a second edition published in 2011. But then the latest edition is a third edition, which was published in 2019. So this was published after Marsha had passed away and Family Tree Books asked Sonny Morton to write a chapter about family tree hints and Diane’s other to add a chapter on dna.

Diana (9m 43s):
So that brings it a little bit more up to date with those two things that we are now working with so much in our Genealogy. So I thought that was a wise decision by Family Tree books to add a couple chapters and you know, everything else is pretty much timeless.

Nicole (9m 58s):
I love that those two chapters were added in. The addition that I have on my Kindle, one of the appendixes is a, an article about d n, it was written a long time ago at the beginning of DNA n a usage. So it was out of date, it was still good, it was just, it needed to be updated and so that’s perfect that Diane Su had written that chapter.

Diana (10m 21s):
Yeah, and you know that’s going to continue to change too. DNA is something that is evolving and will continue to have updates. So there will might be another edition down the road.

Nicole (10m 32s):
Yeah, I think it’s wonderful that they’re continuing to keep it published and current even after Marsha’s death. The chapter headings of the book give a pretty good glimpse into what the book could hold for you. So we’ll go through each chapter and give some of our own thoughts as well as a tip from the book. So the first one is analyzing research problems and planning strategies and she talks about the idea of search versus research. I like how she talks about how research is like applying herself to a question and she gives some research steps. The research steps she talks about are to first define the problem and then survey existing material, analyze the information, develop a strategy, gather data, evaluate the information obtained, draw conclusions, and then form subsequent plans and I like how she has this in like a circle, like a a cycle image of doing this over and over until you feel like you’ve found sufficient information that you can then finalize what you’ve found and write whatever kind of written conclusion you’re going to write.

Diana (11m 46s):
Oh, I agree totally. And a lot of those steps are very familiar, right? That’s a lot of what we teach with the research. Like, a Pro Pro process, that exact type of process where it is iterative you, you work on a specific objective and you get all the way through your project, you draw some conclusions, write something up, and then you start again. Keep on going. It’s always really fun to just get a different look at how someone has defined how to do research and I really enjoyed reading that chapter.

Nicole (12m 16s):
Yeah. Here’s the quote that I was thinking of and I wanted to say it. It says, research is a diligent and systematic inquiry into a problem.

Diana (12m 25s):
Love that. Yeah. And you really do have to define a problem. And so you know, that’s research versus search where you just go on and start accepting hints or just kind of going down the rabbit hole of seeing what you can find without anything specific that you’re looking for. Just putting in your surname and seeing what pops up. you know, we’ve all done that and that’s fun, it’s fun to search, but if you’re gonna make progress you really do have to research. So I love that differentiation. Well the next chapter is avoiding 10 common Genealogy mistakes. So, we won’t go through all of those, but I picked out just a few to talk about because I thought they were so good.

Diana (13m 5s):
So one of them is learning to use just one or maybe two good sources. So sometimes we think if we get really expert at the census and maybe vital records that we are, that’s good. That’s all we need to know. And we leave out some of those harder records like maybe land records or probate or court records, some of the things that you really need to learn to use. So I thought that was an interesting mistake sticking to your comfort zone basically.

Nicole (13m 38s):
Yeah,

Diana (13m 41s):
We all have comfort zones in our research, that’s for sure. And then another one is hanging onto a theory for too long, and this reminded me of my Cynthia Dillard case where I just knew it was George W. Dillard had to be her father until we found a friend emailed me the Bible pages and we determined that it did not look like he was her father at all. And then I had to come up with a new theory and I’m still working on that, but sometimes the evidence just looks so good and we just want it to be that. So I think that is, that’s a fun one to just say, okay, let’s move on. That probably is not right. Oh, and then this one I thought was super interesting coming up with excuses for record discrepancies and we have to deal with this in our client projects all the time because you know, if you’re trying to correlate a bunch of different records, you’re going to have discrepancies.

Diana (14m 34s):
So do you just make excuses and say, oh it’s just because the enumerator wrote down the wrong number. I mean, you know, we can come up with all sorts of ideas and I think there’s kind of a fine line between it being an excuse for record discrepancy and then trying to resolve the conflict. I don’t know, what do you, do you think?

Nicole (14m 53s):
Yeah, I think that sometimes we just come up with the cockeyed idea of oh yeah, just because of that. But the difference between that and like resolving the conflict is learning about the source, studying about the time, having like the context to understand the source and then assessing its reliability. If we’ve done that, then we’re not making excuses, we’re actually understanding.

Diana (15m 19s):
There you go. Well this is a fun one, this mistake finding an interesting ancestor in earlier time periods and trying to link up with him. So oh my goodness, don’t we all wanna

Nicole (15m 31s):
Ancestor somebody you really wanna be related

Diana (15m 34s):
To? Well yeah, like that Cherokee princess like Pocahontas or George Washington or you know, whatever interesting ancestor, maybe they have the same surname or well here’s my favorite, you know, family search will send out email sometime and say you have a Mayflower ancestor or you’re related to this person because on the family search family tree, it shows that. But we know that after a few generations, those linkages are very highly suspect. And so if you are seeing that you are related to a Mayflower ancestor, just know that there’s probably a edit place in there that may not be accurate.

Nicole (16m 14s):
It’s possible that I could be wrong.

Diana (16m 18s):
Yeah. So I thought that was a fun

Nicole (16m 19s):
One. Well I have an example of that. So my mother-in-law is a Hancock, her maiden name. And in her family they’ve always had the question, well are we related to the famous John Hancock? Hmm. you know, who signed the Declaration of Independence? And the family has various theories and you know, some think that they are related to him, other people say no that’s incorrect. And so every once in a while my mother-in-law will ask, can you figure that out and find out if we really are related to him? And so I haven’t taken up that project yet.

Diana (16m 53s):
Oh that’d be like a fun Christmas present one year to do that research for her. That’d be kind of neat. You could give that to all the, the family members

Nicole (17m 2s):
Or would that be one of these mistakes trying to link up to a famous ancestor

Diana (17m 7s):
And you’d have to give them the negative evidence that you know.

Nicole (17m 11s):
Sorry. No, probably what I would do. I mean actually to figure that out, I think it would be neat to trace down a A Y DNA test taker from Yeah, from our Hancock line, you know, our earliest known Hancock and

Diana (17m 25s):
Well that’s a great idea.

Nicole (17m 26s):
I haven’t even looked at this line at all. So who knows, maybe if I go and look there will be documentary evidence linking back to different line And. it will be easy to figure out, who knows?

Diana (17m 36s):
But could be. That’s interesting, that’s

Nicole (17m 39s):
Fun. But I would be interested in doing the Y DNA

Diana (17m 41s):
Too. Yeah, that would be a really good, good project. Well let’s do a couple more of these 10 common Genealogy mistakes. So one of them is studying only one piece of data at a time to avoid confusion. Hmm. and I love this idea. It, it kind of speaks to just taking this one document and not correlating it with anything else, which we know is not very helpful because our Ancestors didn’t just leave one document in their lives. Well actually some of them we feel like they only left one document, but you know, we have to try to put them in context with everything else and we can get really messed up if we are only using one piece of data at a time.

Nicole (18m 21s):
That’s interesting. I like the idea of looking at the documents surrounding that one. I have an example of this actually where I had looked at a marriage bond for John West. He just didn’t seem to have any friends or associates. He just seemed to only be friends with his in-laws. He got married a second time and on his second marriage bond there was a witness, his name was Daniel Withers I think. Then later I saw a marriage of a Charles West to a Sally Withers and I thought, oh withers, I’ve seen that name twice. Maybe there’s this connection to the Charles West because of the Withers family.

Nicole (19m 3s):
And Daniel Withers was a witness on John West’s marriage. So maybe that was an associate and a friend. So I kind of went on that theory for a while. But then I had the feeling I should go back and look at all the other marriage bonds because what if Daniel Withers was just like a witness on all of them, like maybe he was a clerk or something. And sure enough he witnessed like half of the marriage bonds. So then that totally threw my theory out the window. Yeah, because there was no special connection with him and John West. He was just there at the courthouse, he was the clerk.

Diana (19m 35s):
That’s a great example. So many good things to take away from that. Well the last mistake we’ll talk about is looking for magic documents. And this one cracked me up, so I’m just gonna read this from the book. The most effective strategy is not to keep looking for a magic document, but to gather as much information as possible. Carefully examine each record you find, correlate the data with that in other records and look for circumstantial evidence that will establish relationships among them. Well I think so often we try to do a project and we are trying to find that one document that actually states the parent-child relationship or the marriage And. it just may not exist.

Diana (20m 16s):
And so that’s why we have come up with this whole idea of using indirect evidence and writing case studies and the genealogical proof standard to actually be able to prove something without a magic document.

Nicole (20m 29s):
Yeah, I, I think we’ve all found a document that does seem magical before you know where we’re like yes, but then there’s other times when that just doesn’t exist for the family we’re researching. Yeah, you just have to use what you have And. it is heartening to know that you can make a proof argument without a magic magic document with that direct evidence. You can use all of these little clues you’ve found and put it together.

Diana (20m 53s):
Right. And then you know, the reason we use qualifiers such as probably, almost certainly likely is because there might be a magic document surfaced someday in the future. Maybe there is a family bible that somebody’s going to eventually put online. you know, we always know something might happen, but we do the best with what we have and write our case study for that time with that evidence and just knowing that there might be something that overturns it in the future.

Nicole (21m 22s):
I love those. That’s such a fun chapter In my Kindle version, the addition that I have must be the first or second edition. This is chapter 10 in the book. So it’s interesting that they had moved it up to

Diana (21m 33s):
Chapter two. Yeah, that is.

Nicole (21m 35s):
So we’re talking about the third edition. And so the third chapter in the third edition is about finding birth marriages and deaths before civil Registration, which can be a challenge. And a lot of states didn’t have civil Registration until after like 1910 or later. So we’re looking at this for a lot of time periods that we’re working on in the 18 hundreds and trying to figure it out. And she talks about vital Registration substitutes, family sources, church records, newspapers and tombstones and I think tombstones are a pretty common one that most of us use quite often for these births and deaths as well as church records.

Nicole (22m 19s):
And if you can find church records for your Ancestors, that’s a gold mine because a lot of churches kept really good records for that. And that’s often where you’ll find marriage records as well. So this is a really helpful chapter to really dive in and think about where can we find vital records when there was not civil Registration yet?

Diana (22m 40s):
I agree. I think we can get a a little stuck on looking for a birth record where we know that especially on the frontier, people did often keep birth records. It just didn’t happen. So you know, just knowing your locality and trying to expand your ideas. This makes me think of that family search wiki table that gives you ideas for finding different facts and they give you a list of all of these different types of sources because sometimes we’re just like in our little box of research and we need to expand that, especially if we’ve never had any experience finding anything. Like if you’ve never used church records, you may not even tackle that.

Diana (23m 20s):
You may not even realize what could be there. So kind of going back to that using just the same types of sources all the time. Right.

Nicole (23m 27s):
All

Diana (23m 28s):
Right, well let’s do chapter four and there’s a lot more in chapter three on birth marriages and deaths. There’s case studies and all sorts of interesting examples and tips. So that’s a great chapter if you are really struggling with those vital facts. But number four is all about locating missing Ancestors in the census and oh my goodness we all have this where we cannot find our people and sometimes I’ve had this situation where they are on the tax list. So for instance, my latest project was in Isard County, Arkansas and I have the text list, I have the mention of that in 1839 and 1845 for my Weatherford family.

Diana (24m 10s):
So you’d think they’d be on the 1840 census. Right? But nope, I have searched that census page by page and cannot find them on that census. So I was especially interested to see what Marsha had to say about locating missing Ancestors and she kind of divides it up into two sections. You know the first one is just errors in the census database and we’ve all had this where the transcription is completely wrong or the indexing is wrong. So there’s that error. And then another problem is that your Ancestors actually there in the census but is hidden. And this one might be if the surname is a mistake.

Diana (24m 52s):
So for instance, do you remember Nicole when you first found our Eliza Ann Eisenhower in a census? I believe it was the 1860, but her mother had remarried so she was under the name of the head of household who was a blevins. So she wasn’t listed as Eliza Ann Eisenhower, she was listed as Eliza Ann Blevins and I still remember when you found that and you came out and said I found her. I found her. It was so fun.

Nicole (25m 19s):
Yes. That was just one of my baby Genealogy moments of like this is exciting to discover things that were hidden and yeah, so she was under her stepfather’s name.

Diana (25m 30s):
Right. And so you know, that happens sometimes the enumerator just used the head of household name and didn’t take the time or the effort or whoever was the informant. Didn’t tell them all the difference surnames of the people in the household. Yeah,

Nicole (25m 44s):
It was the 1870 census.

Diana (25m 47s):
Okay

Nicole (25m 47s):
So it was Elisa, a e l i s a, Elisa Ann Blevins. So you can see how, why it would be hard cuz we were looking for Eliza and Eisenhower

Diana (25m 57s):
And the reason you knew that was her was because she was in the family group. you know, it was clear from the siblings and her mother that this was the correct family. Right. Yeah.

Nicole (26m 8s):
I think I had decided to search for Texana or I don’t know what I had done but you know, maybe I had traced the mom forward and found out she got married. But the mom Pollyanne had married Squire Blevins and there were a bunch of children in the household. So t Tennessee, California, they had great names for

Diana (26m 30s):
Their daughters. Those were great names and I remember seeing that and just kind of laughing and thinking, oh my goodness, this is the only texana. But then I found out that a lot of people were naming their daughters Texa, especially Texas. That’s so funny. Well it’s gonna be like in the future, somebody’s gonna look at all the names from the 1970s and go people name their children’s summer and spring. Oh there’s a lot of summers. That’s So. we have these cultural names and we see that and we’re doing our family history. It’s fun. So another reason that Marsha talks about why the ancestor doesn’t show up in the census is because they really were missed in the census.

Diana (27m 13s):
and I have a feeling, I’ve got a couple of those travel migration also isolated areas and that one really was interesting to me because that instance that I was talking about with the Weatherford family in 1840 Isard County, Arkansas at the time, I mean this is in the Ozarks, it’s very wooded and perhaps they were just like out in the middle of nowhere and the census taker dismissed them. I don’t know, you know that that is something that could happen. But we also have our Robert Sni Royston who was traveling from Alabama to Texas about that time and he’s nowhere to be found in the 1870 census. And that has a lot of problems just in the south because of reconstruction, you know, after the Civil War.

Diana (27m 58s):
So you know, I thought that was really an interesting perspective. You may not be finding your ancestor because they really were missed or they’re there but they’re just hidden because of different naming mistakes or you’re just not finding ’em. Cuz the transcription indexing has some errors in them. So lots to think about, lots of fun things in that chapter.

Nicole (28m 17s):
Really. great. The next chapter is called Researching Friends Associates and Extended Family Members. And in this chapter, Marsha references Elizabeth Shone Mills who first introduced the cluster research methodology at her advanced methodology at I G H R, the Institute for Genealogical and Historical Research. By the 1990s it was called Cluster Genealogy and other names as well. But she talks about these family networks and reasons to study collateral lines and how to do it and she gives 11 tips. So a couple of the tips are to be sure to understand the meaning of kinship terms used in the period you are studying.

Nicole (28m 59s):
And that’s a really interesting one. In one of my research projects in England, I found a newspaper article mentioning Thomas Bradley’s father-in-law, but it was actually his stepfather. So the way that we use it now was different than the way they used it back then. Another one of her tips is ties to the wife’s kin are typically stronger than those to the husband’s unless the male ties are crucial to the husband’s occupation. And that was such a great tip as well, just to think about the fact that usually the wife wanted to stay closer to her family or for whatever reason that was common. And I’ve seen that as well in my John West research that I’m looking at right now.

Diana (29m 39s):
Yeah, you you mentioned that, that I think that’s so interesting and I wonder if that’s sometimes because the man leaves his birth family to go out and be an adventurer or to go claim land somewhere and then while he’s there he meets the, the young women and her family’s established there and they just kind of stick with her family.

Nicole (29m 56s):
That sounds accurate.

Diana (29m 58s):
Well, and Marsha doesn’t just come up with these ideas without having researched a ton of families. you know, she did so much work in this location, in this era that she was able to really see these patterns. So I think that’s so interesting because most of us will never do as much of a study of an area and all the pioneers in that area, which we’ll talk about a little bit later. This is a great tip. Yeah, really, really good for our hypothesizing I think. Okay, so the next chapter is problem solving with court records. And usually when I think about court records, I think about the court minutes, those type of records, that’s often what I’m talking about with court records.

Diana (30m 44s):
But she actually just has all of the different records you would find at the courthouse in this chapter So, we have sections on probate and land records and really good discussion about what all the different terms are. So she takes us through the probate process and gives some really good tips on using land records and some of the difficult terminology in land records. you know, so many times we’re reading the record, doing the transcription and we just do not understand what in the world they’re talking about. And so she defines some terms like courtesy and dowry and talks about it in context of the time as well.

Diana (31m 26s):
Like colonial law was different than, you know, once a colony becomes a state. So good discussion on probate and land and then she gives some tips for researching at courthouses and then goes into tax records and circuit court records. So really valuable chapter if you’ve been just putting that off, learning about all that, I’d highly recommend going through the chapter and then a whole two page spread on legal terms, which is so helpful with more down to earth descriptions of some of these words like quit claim, deposition, court of chancery, you know, what do all these things mean? So you know that might be a good one to a bookmark and come back to it when you need it.

Nicole (32m 9s):
What a helpful chapter. And then the next chapter is very complimentary to that. It’s replacing burned courthouse records and the first tip is really to understand the disaster, what really burned and that’s really useful. I think sometimes when we hear that a courthouse burned, we think everything was ruined before that period, but it actually isn’t the case. And sometimes you’ll have five deed volumes were burned, but six remain and one is partially damaged, something like that. And so you have to to really find out what was actually ruined and what wasn’t. And sometimes the only way to do that in my experience is to go in and look at the family search catalog for that county and just see what they still have.

Nicole (32m 50s):
And then she has a section called eight Questions for record loss Events. And one of those tips is to ask yourself, did your family live near a county boundary and to see if maybe they recorded some events in a nearby county. So this is a great section for record loss

Diana (33m 8s):
And I think you can also think about it in terms if you’re not finding your family in the county you think they should be because a lot of it does have to do with understanding the geography and where they lived and county boundaries. So that was really helpful. Well the next chapter is utilizing land records So. we talk a little bit about land records in the court records section, but chapter eight is all about how to use the land records. And it’s fun because one of the pages has a quiz testing your land record knowledge. And so I took that quiz and I am pleased to report that I got it all right.

Diana (33m 50s):
I was really glad that I understood land records, it was fun. I love the quiz. I thought that was just such a fun thing to put in there that is fun. And then so many good case studies about how she solved cases with the land records. I think it helps us to be motivated to learn how to use land records when we realize how valuable they can be. So good chapter and has some fun titles like details, deeds, and one of the tips is to track down every piece of property owned by your Ancestors, which I think is really helpful. Sometimes down the census we see that they own property and we’re like, oh look they own property, that’s great and go narrowly on our way. But you know, this tip to track down every piece of property and really understand what’s going on with the land is very helpful if we’re going to do that reasonably exhaustive research.

Diana (34m 37s):
Right.

Nicole (34m 38s):
The next chapter is sorting individuals with the same name. She talks about five common errors related to names. One tip is we shouldn’t neglect to search records thoroughly and systematically and that can be really important when we’re trying to distinguish people with with the same name in the same area. And then another section in this chapter is Eight Steps to Distinguish Individuals. And one of the tips there is to really pinpoint their location. And back when I did one of my very first client projects with a John Johnson, that was exactly what I learned is that I had to figure out where each of these men lived. and I found there was a John Johnson who lived on Beaver Dam Creek and a John Johnson who lived on Cabin Creek and all these different parts of Rowan County, North Carolina.

Nicole (35m 25s):
And once I was able to pin them to their location, it became much easier to sort them out. And the other thing that helped with that was just knowing their neighbors and the names of their associates,

Diana (35m 35s):
Right? I think so many of us struggle with that same name individual or having like 10 people the same name. How do you know it’s your guy? And having really specific ideas is so helpful. Well chapter 10 is on finding pre 1850 Ancestors, which is where we get stuck a lot because the census is only named the head of a household. And so one of the big tips here is to focus on families and not names because we are looking for our person in the context of a family and that can really help us to know that we have got the right person, you know, with people of the same name. And so Marsha gives us 13 suggestions for researching Pioneer era Ancestors.

Diana (36m 20s):
And a couple of those are interesting. I love this one link younger settlers with older ones and I thought that was interesting because sometimes we look at a county and we see, you know, John Smith and John Smith senior and we recognize that they may not have any family relationship. But I think this kind of goes with another suggestion, which is expect your ancestor to be normal. And so, you know, it makes sense that normally you would have a junior senior linked, you know, I think that’s an interesting concept or a thought, expect things to be normal. I think sometimes we, when we can’t figure out something, we make up these stories and our ancestor was the outlier.

Diana (37m 3s):
He never did this or never did that. That’s why we can’t find him in the the records. But this idea that he is probably normal, you know, he probably married in his twenties, probably had at least one, two or three wives, you know, depending on the era.

Nicole (37m 17s):
We had to sit down after three wives.

Diana (37m 20s):
Well, in the pioneer era when the women died in childbirth. Yes.

Nicole (37m 25s):
Or in Utah, you know, you know our Ancestors who were polygamists I guess.

Diana (37m 29s):
And for a woman, you know, she probably got married in her teens or early twenties and had children every two years. you know, you want to kind of just see if things are normal. So anyway, I thought that was just really a fun tip and there’s so many more suggestions on this whole idea of finding those pioneer eras. Ancestors pre 1850

Nicole (37m 50s):
Great ideas. The next chapter is called Analyzing Evidence, and this is a fun chapter. She has definitions of genealogical evidence and direct and indirect. Then she has a quiz and you have to put a D next to examples of direct evidence and an I after examples of indirect evidence. So that’s fun. Then later she talks about reliability of evidence, And, it has a quiz about that.

Diana (38m 17s):
And she has a Really great bibliography with a long list of ideas and a lot of them are articles from the National Genealogical Society quarterly. So really good examples of how to analyze and correlate. There’s just a lot of things to take away from this book a of studying to be done with it. I was really impressed with it as I read it, with how much information and how helpful it could be for when we’re just stuck.

Nicole (38m 45s):
So good. One quote that is bolded in the Kindle version of this chapter is, and I think if, if a lot of people highlight it, maybe that’s when it turns bold, I’m not sure, but it says genealogical researchers quickly discover that no matter what record we analyze, there is a chance that it might be wrong.

Diana (39m 2s):
And I think that is

Nicole (39m 3s):
It. It’s kind of true that like no matter what we’re looking at, we have seen too many records where there’s just errors or people relying or there’s just always a chance that it’s incorrect for some reason or another.

Diana (39m 15s):
Right? Which is why we correlate all the evidence it has to all come together. We can’t rely on any one single piece to make our case, especially if it’s a difficult case.

Nicole (39m 29s):
Absolutely. So that was a great chapter.

Diana (39m 31s):
That is a great chapter. Well the last two, we already talked a little bit about their new chapters that were written by Sonny Morton and Diane sued. And Sonny has a chapter on accepting online family tree hints. And that’s fun because I think we all kind of struggle how to use these hints. Where do they come from, what do we do with them, how accurate are they? And so she has some really good tips in there on the hints. And then Diane Seth has written the chapter Applying DNA test results to your research and has some really nice ideas about what to do to to get started and some good tips there as well. So I thought that was a nice addition.

Diana (40m 11s):
And, it just kind of finishes up the book, brings it up to date and at the very end there’s a glossary. Great book.

Nicole (40m 17s):
Well, I really enjoyed learning more about Marsha Hoffman Rising in the introduction to the book. And she had a real love of reading and traveling, which is why at the beginning of this episode we thought it would be fun to talk about the books that we’ve been reading and what books we have enjoyed recently. and I did wanna say, you know, when I was reading the Ribbons of Scarlet book about the French Revolution and they talked about Versi quite a few times. I remember visiting Versi when I was in study abroad and I studied abroad in England and we took a trip to Paris. So it was just fun to feel like kindred spirits with Marsha because she liked reading and traveling and we were able to do some traveling in college and, and we love reading too.

Nicole (41m 2s):
So it was just fun to hear about her and her life and, and she has done a lot of amazing work to benefit the Genealogy world so you can learn more about her and the work that she did on her webpage. She did an amazing project to research the first 1000 pioneers who purchased land in southwestern Missouri from the Springfield Land Office. Isn’t that an incredible project? So she worked on that and found the geographical origins of 853 of these pioneers, and her webpage includes a list of these families. When you looked at that list, what did you find?

Diana (41m 38s):
I always look for, you know, my family names and I knew my Briscoes were there and I found John Briscoe and Susanna Clanton, who are the parents of our Elizabeth and Briscoe, and she is my bully. Second great-grandmother. And so these would be third great-grandparents, your fourth great-grandparents. So that was really neat. That was in the list. So now I wanna go check out the book and see what else she found about them. I’m just so curious to see, you know, if there are sources listed there, you know how that works. But I did find that it’s at the Family History Library, they have all four volumes, and so I can go there and review that.

Diana (42m 19s):
You can also purchase it, but it’s pretty pricey for all four volumes. So I’m guessing that this might be something that a society or a library would purchase. So I would definitely recommend just looking at World Cat and I saw in World Cat. There’s so many libraries that have this four Volume set. So if you think you might have family in the first families of Southwest Missouri, you could take a look. So it’s always fun to discover a new resource one that I had no idea about.

Nicole (42m 45s):
Well, this has just been a delight to talk about this book. So although the examples in The Family Tree Problem Solver focused on her research in Southwest Missouri families, I didn’t feel like it was only applicable to research in Missouri at all. It was definitely useful for United States research and beyond, I think. So hopefully you’ll find it a useful book to learn principles that will help in your research regardless of locality.

Diana (43m 13s):
I agree. Just so many of the principles are tried and true for anywhere that you’re researching. So I hope everybody can get a hold of a copy, whether it’s from a library or you decide to purchase it and put it on your bookshelf as one of those go-to books. And if you maybe have it, you know, if you’re like me, sometimes you purchase books and they sit on your shelves and you don’t open them. Maybe this will motivate you to open it and actually read it and use it. So good luck with your research everyone, and have a great week. Thanks for listening.

Nicole (43m 44s):
All right, bye-bye.

Diana (43m 45s):
Bye-bye.

Nicole (43m 47s):
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