RLP 248: RLP with DNA 10 – Research Logs

Nicole Elder Dyer (1s):
This is Research like a Pro episode 248 RLP with DNA 10 research logs. WWelcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole Elder Dyer (40s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com, break down genealogy brick walls with a subscription to the largest online newspaper archive. Well, hi everybody. Welcome to research like a Pro.

Diana Elder (55s):
Hi Nicole, how are you today? I’m

Nicole Elder Dyer (57s):
Great. How are you doing? What have you been working on?

Diana Elder (60s):
I’ve been writing my 52 ancestor blog posts weekly and when I started this year I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep up. Actually, I think I missed the week of Roots Tech, so I’ll have to, yeah, I’ll have to make that one up. But I’ve been really enjoying it because it’s given me some fun topics that I ordinary wouldn’t think of. So this last week I did the topic lucky and I was thinking, okay, who was one of the lucky ancestors and they had suggested maybe somebody who won a lottery. And we have our ancestor Thomas Beverly Royston who got land through the Georgia Land Lottery of 1827 under the name of John Roy’s Orphan. So I used that as part of my proof connecting him to John Royston and it was really fun to go back through my research and remember what I had thought, put all that together.

Diana Elder (1m 46s):
I used that in my four generation project for accreditation. So you know, returning to past research I saw a lot of ideas for more research too. So that’s always fun.

Nicole Elder Dyer (1m 56s):
Neat. And how did you connect the name Thomas Beverly Royston with John Royston Orphan?

Diana Elder (2m 2s):
Well, John Royston married Poly Sessna in 1803 and then she files for a divorce in 1814. And this is all in Green County, Georgia. And in her divorce petition she talks about how he left her with three children and then I had Thomas Beverly Resons Ed Stone, which gives him a birth of 1806. And then I had found a Sarah Baldwin Royston who marries David Irwin and hypothesized that they were brother sister and she was born in 1808 in Green County. It actually gives the county on one of her censuses later on, maybe 18 70, 18 60.

Diana Elder (2m 44s):
And living in her household is a Robert Cessna. So seeing the Cessna Royston connection, you know, I just kept researching, researching and Poly Cessna was married first to a Samuel Cessna and had three children, one of which was Robert Cessna. And guess what? Both Thomas Beverly and Sarah Baldwin named a child Robert Cessna after their half-brother. Cool. So I mean this is, it’s just a bunch of indirect evidence bringing it all together. Well John Roy’s orphan, the land lottery ticket or the, the land ground that they give said that he was a resident of Morgan County and in 1831 I have Thomas Royston in a tax list and I have Sarah Baldwin Royston getting married in 1830 right there in Morgan County.

Diana Elder (3m 32s):
And there are other Cessnas there, Robert and Samuel Cessna and Mary Cessna. So I think Mary or Pauly, she goes by both take back Esna name after her divorce. That’s my hypothesis. I don’t know if there’s a record that would show that, but that’s my main hypothesis of that whole family. So anyway, it was fun to revisit that.

Nicole Elder Dyer (3m 52s):
That is fun. Was the Land grant described in a way that you could connect it to an actual piece of land that you connected to Thomas Beverly,

Diana Elder (4m 2s):
I wish it’s out in Lee County, so it’s on the border of Alabama and the Georgia General Assembly would do a series of land lotteries. I think there were eight from about early 1800 up to, I think last one was 1830 ish. And it was always when the Creek tribe had seated more land and then they would have a land lottery for the settlers to go out and get the land grants. And so I do, I have the land description out in Lee County. The only problem is of course Lee County’s courthouse burned and the land records don’t exist at that time. So I have Thomas Beverly, however, in Muskogee County, which is neighboring Lee County in a newspaper saying that he has letters at the post office for him.

Diana Elder (4m 50s):
You know those newspaper when they say all the people have letters for them and kind of can help you put somebody in a place. So that is a record I have for him. Plus he married Cynthia Dillard and I’ve got the Dillards there, George Dillard if, if Cynthia somehow connected to him right there in that area in Muskogee County, which borders Lee County. So my thought is that he went out there, he probably sold that land, which gave him perhaps the money to go on into Alabama, which is where I first have him, about 1837, getting a land patent in Alabama.

Nicole Elder Dyer (5m 25s):
Cool. That’s such a unique record type, but I think it’s an important one in Georgia research.

Diana Elder (5m 30s):
Oh, the land lotteries are wonderful because the requirements are so specific and if your ancestor did get land through the land lottery, then you can just look, look through this list of about 10 different types of groups that could have land. And they are super specific, you know, the father’s been gone from the area for three years, or you are the orphan of a man who served in the Revolutionary War, the war of 1812, or you’re a widow of, you know, these very specific things. So that really helps to figure out your family if you have them winning the lottery and then trying to figure out where they fit so that they could have entered it.

Nicole Elder Dyer (6m 11s):
Yeah, that’s great.

Diana Elder (6m 13s):
Well, what have you been working on?

Nicole Elder Dyer (6m 15s):
I’ve been doing a lot of d n a analysis for my study group project about the parents of John Robert Dyer. I’m actually the father and just working on doing some different Excel comparisons, trying to figure out the matches in common between various test takers who are descendants of the research subject and and using Excel to help me with that with some formulas using V lookup to compare and define matches who share DNA n with both test takers or I put in actually several test takers into one spreadsheet and and made a complex formula to find any, any people who share DNA with at least two people who descend through different unique child lines.

Nicole Elder Dyer (6m 57s):
So that was kind of a fun project.

Diana Elder (6m 59s):
Wow, that’s great. So how are you learning how to do these formulas?

Nicole Elder Dyer (7m 2s):
Paul Woodbury had a webinar and he also talked about this in an institute that I was in, but if you wanna watch his webinar, he has a webinar called Kreme de la Kreme and it’s about targeted testing and finding the most relevant matches to your research project.

Diana Elder (7m 19s):
I like that when you are working, especially with multiple kits or even just for one

Nicole Elder Dyer (7m 25s):
Test. Yeah, his was specifically about

Diana Elder (7m 27s):
Multiple kits. Yeah, well and I think that’s one of the trickier things because you want to have that coverage of a lot of descendants of an ancestor, but then it even makes it more difficult. You have more to analyze. So these little tricks are really useful. I’m ex, yes, I’m excited to learn more about the formulas. Well, let’s do some announcements. We have our new Airtable quick reference guide now available for sell on the website and this is the PDF version that you can print and then get laminated for yourself. If you’ve been wanting to learn Airtable, it’s a great printed option for you to look at and see as you’re trying to follow the steps. We have our Research Psycho Pro webinar series going and we are having so much fun doing these case studies.

Diana Elder (8m 13s):
I will be sharing my Eisenhower case in April and that’s a migration case showing how I figured out my John d Eisenhower’s migration from North Carolina to Cape Shard, Missouri and where he went in between and why he moved. So if you’ve got a similar migrating ancestor, you might want to join us and you can watch all the past recordings, all the future recordings, they are there for you. We have our next research Psycho Pro study group beginning this fall, the very end of August to November, and we invite you to join us for that if you’d like to be a peer group leader and receive complimentary registration. The application for that is on our website.

Diana Elder (8m 52s):
Please join our newsletter for all of our coupons for sales and news and just want to encourage you to consider going out to Richmond, Virginia for the National Genealogical Society Family History Conference. This is the end of May, beginning of June and it’s going to be a wonderful conference. So many interesting topics, whether you have family in Virginia or surrounding states or not, there will be so much there to learn from. So I will be presenting four lectures there and it would be fun to see you

Nicole Elder Dyer (9m 26s):
Today. We have a listener review. The title is one of the best, and it says, whether you are new to family history or have been collecting ancestors for years, you will become a better researcher just by listening to the numerous topics of interest on this weekly podcast research like a pro. Diana and Nicole are a great teaching team who break down the most complicated subjects into easy to understand pieces. Additionally, blog post research aids and links to genealogical resources such as their newsletter can be found on their website, family Lock It. So thank you for that review and we love spotlighting our listeners, so if you leave us a review or send us a comment or question, we can read it on the podcast.

Diana Elder (10m 4s):
Thank you so much for that review. We love hearing those. Well, today we’re going to talk about research logs and this is chapter 10 in our book, research Psycho Pro of dna, A Geneious Guide to Finding and Confirming Ancestors with DNA Evidence. And so we are going to talk all about research logs and writing as you go. So what is a research log? I think a lot of us hear that word and I know before I really learned how to use a research log, I think, oh, I don’t need to do that. I, I know what I’m doing, but I absolutely am a believer in research logs now. And so with our traditional genealogy research logs, we track sources the results and all the information so that we can get back to those sources again, such as call numbers, URLs, repositories.

Diana Elder (10m 56s):
This is a place where we can create our source citation and have that for always, and we can put in document numbers that go along with our research report. So genealogists keep track of where they look for information in their research log and whether they found anything. And this is one of the key concepts that when you’re following your research plan, you will not always have a positive result. You may have negative searches and you want to make sure that you have that recorded. So important that we don’t repeat our searching and the entries in our research logs are a reminder of where we left off and give us a starting point for the next research session. So what about dna?

Diana Elder (11m 37s):
Well, we have DNA sources that we need to log in a research log as well. And with DNA we have so much data, so it’s really critical to the success of our research to track all the DNA sources in our research log. It helps us to make connections between all of our information items by having them all in one place. Now many of the DNA matches that we review don’t tell us anything at the beginning, but just like negative searches in a census database, we note the negative results of viewing a DNA match page when nothing is discovered.

Diana Elder (12m 17s):
And then we can return to this DNA match and dig deeper to determine the connection. We can see all the clues that we put in there like surnames, shared matches, common locations in the family tree. And these can prove useful in the future if we have them captured in our log. Without a research log, you will forget the information you viewed and it won’t be available to you to correlate and form conclusions. One of the distinctive and helpful elements of our research log is the URL for records and reports online and recording the URL allows you to quickly return to the webpage where the record or negative search results were found.

Diana Elder (12m 59s):
Even if you include a URL in the report citations, it will usually be a shortened version of the url. So having the full URL in the research log is beneficial for quickly returning to the record and person of interest. On the record

Nicole Elder Dyer (13m 13s):
As you were talking, I was thinking about my research log that I’ve been working on for the study group and I’ve been combining a lot of previous research logs and I had forgotten several of the things I had discovered. And so it’s really true that recording it in your log helps you remember it in the future, especially when you return to a project after it’s been a while.

Diana Elder (13m 32s):
That is for sure. And I was thinking about how often we sit down and with our DNA especially, we might spend an hour or two just clicking around looking at shared matches, looking at different matches in their trees and maybe we have some aha moments, but we never record those and then we forget what we were looking at. We can’t find that tree again. We don’t know which match it was that we found that little clue. So you know, those are all reasons why we wanna have a research log and really focus on a specific objective rather than just clicking around.

Nicole Elder Dyer (14m 4s):
Yeah, let’s talk about tools now. Tools for making research logs. There’s so many out there to figure out which tool works best for you. It’s good to think about what you might want to do with the log eventually. So tools that allow you to set up a table or a spreadsheet are pretty good because then you can sort data and manage multiple tables and the type of tool that you use might just be like a table within a document, but even better than that is like a spreadsheet because you can manage multiple sheets or multiple pages of data within tables. And then in our opinion, the best type of research log tool is one that can allow you to link records between tables and help you minimize the duplicate data entry.

Nicole Elder Dyer (14m 52s):
So you will probably want to use some kind of spreadsheet program or even better a database,

Diana Elder (14m 58s):
Right? Spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets are what a lot of people use for their research logs. And the very first research log that I used when I was starting accreditation, I did it in Google Sheets and started formulating what I wanted for my different columns. And it is so nice in a spreadsheet that you can enter your data, you have it in rows and columns and then you can sort the data, you can add the URLs to the cells and format them in so many ways. Excel is more powerful and it has more data sorting and formatting options than Google Sheets. But Google Sheets is really nice for the way you can collaborate. So if you are working closely with another researcher, you’re both working on the same project and you maybe you’ve divided up the research plan and you want to use the same research log, then perhaps you would really enjoy using Google Sheets.

Diana Elder (15m 51s):
But know that with Excel you can do more and if you become an Excel power user, then perhaps that is what you want to do for your research log.

Nicole Elder Dyer (16m 2s):
Well, we talked about database programs as being another option to spreadsheets and these are really helpful for recording a lot of data points. And if you’re going to describe different data points in a lot of different ways like we do with D N A matches in A D N A project, then a relational database will be a really helpful tool for you. And a relational database is a type of database that stores and provides access to data points that are related to one another and the data points are represented in tables and the rows and the tables can be linked to fields and other tables that describe the data points in different ways. And so it’s helpful to divide all your information into multiple tables so that you don’t have duplicate locations for the same information.

Nicole Elder Dyer (16m 49s):
You could potentially try to put everything about one DNA match into a single row, but then you would have so many columns trying to describe the correspondence you’ve had with them, the research you’ve done about them. And then you might have to duplicate rows. If you’re doing a lot of research and you want to log all the research you’re doing about this one D N A match will you have to repeat how many cent Morgans are shared in each row and then you’re just duplicating your work in order to not duplicate data entry. The concept of normalizing your data or dividing the information into tables with the goal of having everything in its place is an important concept in relational databases and that’s kind of the goal of them.

Nicole Elder Dyer (17m 31s):
So they’re really useful for genetic genealogy because you may have tables like test takers, kit access, match information, correspondence, research, define the common ancestors, surnames segments, locations, all kinds of things that will help you find the evidence you need in your case. And so there’s a lot of database options, but as you know, Airtable is our favorite probably because it’s so user friendly and easy to learn when compared with more advanced database tools that require more knowledge of programming and things. But if you wanna try Airtable and you can just go to airtable.com and set up a free account, it’s a web-based spreadsheet and database program, it allows you to create links between tables, you can sort and group your data, you can create unique field types.

Nicole Elder Dyer (18m 19s):
Some of those field types are just really helpful for keeping everything organized. The long text field type allows you to do rich text formatting including italics for source citations and check boxes and all kinds of different ways to incorporate your information within Airtable. A spreadsheet is called a base and then the pages or sheets within the base are called tables. And then within each table rows are called records and columns are called fields. And one of the most powerful tools for visualizing your research is the ability to group the rows in a table by a certain field. I just love doing that.

Nicole Elder Dyer (18m 60s):
It’s so nice to be able to keep track of all of the research you’re doing in one place and then be able to see just the tax records in one grouping or just the matches who descend from a particular common ancestral couple in one kind of mini research log. Another really useful feature of Airtable is the ability to create custom field types and I mentioned that earlier, but some of the different types are long text numbers, dates, multiple and single select check boxes and even attachments where you can upload or link to an image of your document or of the common ancestor hint from ancestry.

Nicole Elder Dyer (19m 40s):
There’s also the possibility for keeping track of all the segment data in your project in its own table and you can just copy and paste in the chromosome number and the start and end location. And then if you group that information by test taker and chromosome and sorting by the start point, then the table becomes a chromosome map. So it’s kind of nice to be able to compare that segment data all within Airtable. So to look for more information about Airtable, you can go to their website, they have a great help area and they also have Airtable universe where you can find templates from authors. And so I’ve shared my templates there that you can copy and use.

Nicole Elder Dyer (20m 21s):
The one that you want to use probably is the research like a pro with DNA base. And I update that one every year and put the current year on it so that you know which one is the most recent so you can go and duplicate those bases to use for yourself in all of your upcoming projects.

Diana Elder (20m 40s):
As you were talking, I was thinking about the difference between my Google spreadsheet research log that I did for accreditation on John Royston who I was talking about at the beginning of the podcast. It had 150 rows and it talked about his two spouses and several children and his own records and it was so big and even though I could sort my Google sheet by locality and date, I couldn’t do what I can do in air tables. So I spent a couple hours, you know, copying all of that and pasting it into air table and then added some key fields and then I created special views. So I have a view just for John Kerry Royston and then a view just for each of his wives and his children.

Diana Elder (21m 25s):
It is so wonderful. And then I can group and sort within those views or I can just go back to my main view. Yeah, it gives me so much more capability to really find the records and analyze them. So my goal will be to get all of my old research logs eventually into Airtable,

Nicole Elder Dyer (21m 43s):
Right?

Diana Elder (21m 45s):
So let’s talk about adding DNA sources to a research log. There are so many things you might want to track in your DNA research log, test takers, genetic cousins, match details, correspondence, segment data, locations, surnames, a log of the tools you’ve used, like if you’ve done something at genetic affairs or you’ve created a Guffy network graph, you can log the specific parameters that you use for those reports or tools. And tracking these in separate pages of a spreadsheet or database can help you stay organized. So Airtable is wonderful because it has several of these bases already created. If you use Nicole’s templates and it’s basically fill in the blank, open up your match page and start filling in all the different fields, it’s so fun.

Nicole Elder Dyer (22m 34s):
Let’s talk about tracking people. So usually I recommend having a table just called people where you have all of the different people involved in your project. And the main people in a DNA research project will be the people who test their DNA and you know, DNA matches. So you’ll want to have a separate page to keep track of the contact information for these people, their haplo groups, kind of details that pertain just to that person and not to their match with someone else. And I wouldn’t recommend that you add all of your DNA matches. I would just add the test takers and the matches that are relevant to your current project. I know sometimes we want to have a spreadsheet with all the matches for a test taker, but for Airtable I really recommend that you create a separate research log for each project or objective.

Nicole Elder Dyer (23m 22s):
And then when you add matches to your log, you only need to focus on the matches that are relevant at that time, including all the matches in someone’s match list would obscure the information you’re trying to draw out because usually we’re trying to find just one particular ancestor and not the entire tree of a particular test taker. When performing research for a client, I’ll usually create a new new research log for each project and some if it’s a repeat phase, then I’ll duplicate the base so that I have a record of what was known in the first project and then add to it for the second project. And keeping the log limited to a focused objective helps keep the size of the log manageable and it can also help you stay on the free Airtable plan, which it limits you to 1200 rows per base so it adds above the rows in each table.

Nicole Elder Dyer (24m 10s):
And then if you get over 1200, then it wants you to upgrade. Well, here are some possible column headers to use when logging the people involved in a project, the name of the person, the role the person plays in the project, whether they’re the test taker, a match to one of those test takers, a research subject, a possible relative, a collaborator, a link to the profile page. So like if somebody is a DNA match and they have a profile page at Ancestry, you can link to that and some of these columns or fields won’t apply to every single person in a project, but if I’m going to track that for some of them, I like to have a column or field for that. You can put a link to their family tree for the person’s main family tree that you’re gonna use.

Nicole Elder Dyer (24m 53s):
The GEDMatch kit number if applicable, locations in the matches tree, that might help find the common ancestor surnames in the person’s tree, the person’s residence age, email address, a link to their Facebook profile, phone number, address notes, ethnicity information, mitochondrial and Y D Y D N A, haplo groups, publication, permission form status if they’ve been added to your tree or diagram and many other things that you can imagine that you’d like to track,

Diana Elder (25m 27s):
Right? That’s so helpful to have all of that information in one place. And I especially love the URLs being able just to click and get immediately to the match page. It saves you so much time as you’re trying to compare all these different people. Well another field that you can use in the DNA Airtable base is the ability to track your test takers. And this lets you find all the different information pieces that you need for them. So you may have invited siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins to test and additional relatives who may have shared their DNA results with you. And so if you have a log or a place where you can keep track of all of those kits that you have access to, the tests they have taken and how to access them, that can help you when you’re tracking these multiple test takers.

Diana Elder (26m 19s):
So here’s a list of possible column headers you can use. You would wanna have their name, this is the person who has taken a DNA test and given you permission or access to view the results. And then you’ll want to note the kind of test that was taken, whether it was at Ancestry, 23andme, family Tree dna, the family tree, DNA Y 37 or big Y 700, mitochondrial, full sequence, et cetera. So you know, any kind of tests that you have access to, you could log and then you would want to make sure you note the administrator because sometimes these people, they’re tests are administrative by a child or another family member and you want to know who that is.

Diana Elder (27m 4s):
You can note transfers. So if they have transferred their test results to say Family Tree, dna, living dna, my Heritage, jma, wi Full, or any other company that they have transferred to, and then you’ll need the access details. So this could be kit numbers, their login details, and you might wanna consider if they are sharing that with you that maybe you don’t wanna keep passwords in a more secure document, not in the cloud. That’s kind of up to you how you do that. And then informed consent. And this would let you know that they have said yes, they’ve sent you an informed consent form and given you permission to work with their dna.

Diana Elder (27m 52s):
And if they haven’t sent it back to you, you can track that, that you’ve sent it to them and they have not returned it. So, so many things that you can track and things that you may have thought of asking them but you didn’t note it anywhere and now you can’t remember what they said about that or you can’t find their details. That’s all right there in your air table base.

Nicole Elder Dyer (28m 13s):
The next table is the DNA match details table. And when you find a useful match, it’s important to track that in your log and usually it’s just one row in that table for a match between two people at one company. If you find a match between these same people at another company, you’ll probably need another row because usually they’ll share different amounts at different companies depending on the company’s matching algorithm. And usually it’s not two different, this allows you to track how much DNA is shared in ancestry and how much is shared according to my heritage. And that can be helpful sometimes when another one of your test takers matches that same individual, then that’ll also be a separate row.

Nicole Elder Dyer (28m 55s):
And this is helpful for tracking how much DNA is shared with a relevant match by various descendants of your research subject. The column headers you might use for this table are the test taker’s name and then the DNA matches name. In my mind, I differentiate those by the test takers are people for whom I have access to their DNA results. And then the admin is the person who manages the test. If someone else and the username, sometimes people have a different name than their full name on the test, the shared Santa Morgans, the number of shared segments, the longest segment or the genetic distance, if it’s a wire mitochondrial match in common with or shared matches of interest.

Nicole Elder Dyer (29m 38s):
Sometimes I like to keep track of the shared matches that I, you know, if I found this match by looking at shared matches of a first cousin or second cousin that I know, sometimes I’ll put them there, the company or the test, a link to the match page, a link to the DNA matches tree at that website where the match occurred. And sometimes they’ll have different trees at different companies. You know, one company might have their full tree and the other company might have just a stubby one if they’re in multiple companies, their cluster or genetic network, if you’ve done some kind of cluster chart or network graph, you can put in that the number of their cluster or the color, the relationship if you know it, sometimes I just leave it blank if I don’t know, or I’ll put it in the estimate.

Nicole Elder Dyer (30m 23s):
The most recent common ancestor. And that can be a link to the people table. And if you know both of the people and the couple, you can put both of them there, the expected cent Morgan range, so the range of shared cent Morgans for that traced relationship. And then the average amount from the shared center Morgan project for that relationship. And then a formula that tells you whether or not the amount of shared DNA falls within the expected range for that traced relationship, which can kind of help you check and see if you know the relationship is possible, shared ethnicities between the test taker and the match notes and attachments. And sometimes you’ll wanna have screenshots to include there so that if the match goes away sometime or something changes, you’ll have a record of what it was.

Nicole Elder Dyer (31m 8s):
So these are all just ideas and my Airtable bases usually include most of these suggestions, but I don’t always fill in the entire row for each match. And so you don’t have to fill everything in, it’s just, you know, deciding what you need for the particular project you’re working on. And each project is a little bit different so you don’t have to feel like you need to fill every single thing in, but sometimes the bare minimum would just be like the match page, the name of the matches, and how many cent morgans they share.

Diana Elder (31m 36s):
Right now let’s move to talking about tracking correspondence. And in chapter two the task was to contact matches and keep track of those matches sent in in your research log. So logging your correspondence with matches helps you get organized and it gives you a place to put that valuable information that you receive from your matches. So usually we send out a message and then they may not look at that message or respond to it for a week or two weeks or a year later. And often we are not actively working on the project anymore or we’re doing something else. And so we can quickly open up our research log, we can put in the response, we can then respond to their response.

Diana Elder (32m 19s):
And so it gives us a place to keep everything together. We can track our messages on Ancestry, but some of the other companies, you do it all through email and if you have lost track of where that message is in your email or you maybe got a new email system, you know, you sometimes have to dig to find those and, and it’s so much better to have those in a log where you can see exactly when you received your response and what you need to do next. So here’s some calm headings for a correspondence. Log the date sent the message the name of the DNA match the admin who’s managing the results, if it’s somebody different from the match, who is sending the message so you know, it could be you or they’re sending you back a message.

Diana Elder (33m 4s):
So the from then the type of message. So were you using the ancestry message system, the living DNA message system, email, a Facebook message, phone text. So many ways we communicate with our matches the text of the message. So here I like to just copy and paste in the message that I sent or a summary if it was a phone call or maybe a really long message the date we receive a reply and then the text of the reply, just copy that in or do a summary. And then the next action, what needs to be done next based on the correspondence and then any additional comments about the correspondence. So it’s best to copy and paste the entire message.

Diana Elder (33m 46s):
And it’s nice because on Airtable you can do that because you can open up your cell and then it doesn’t all show all the text. And so you don’t have to have all the texts showing, you’ll just open that up when you want to read the whole message and just expand the cell. So that’s really nice and easy in a database tool like your table.

Nicole Elder Dyer (34m 6s):
Great. Another table in the base that you might want to have is a research log, which is just a place to track documentary sources and d n A tools that you have used. And when I first started with this, I would keep them in separate tables. So I would have a a documentary research log and then a DNA research log. And that quickly got confusing to remember where I had certain things. So now I just recommend putting all of your research log in one table and then you can group it, you can filter it, you can save different views of that, but it’s all in that one place. And typically the distinction in my mind between a research log and the other tables are the new things you discovered after your research plan in the project.

Diana Elder (34m 51s):
All right, so each d n A match may require several sources and searches to determine how they’re related to the test taker. And this means there may be several entries in a research log relating to just one DNA match. So for instance, you could have these possible research log entries for an ancestry DNA match, John searches in published family trees to find John’s ancestors or to extend tree, a link to John’s profile in your ancestry tree showing ancestors you found for him searches and other record groups to find John’s ancestors and white pages search to find John’s contact info. So each one of these items would become a separate row in the research log table.

Diana Elder (35m 34s):
And for each entry you would note the details of what you found and your thoughts and ideas for the next steps. Often you will be researching people of the same name and at first you won’t know which search matches the individual you are looking for. And this is where the research log is so handy you just add both your search results, a separate row and continue to follow the clues. And then often you’ll be able to start separating out these people of the same name, many genetic genealogists, use ancestry.com or other tree building services to build quick trees for your DNA matches.

Diana Elder (36m 13s):
And we like to mark these private and searchable because they’re not proven. We don’t want anyone copying these. And if you do this, then your quick tree may include those specific records that you used to get to know that person’s pedigree. And maybe this could replace some of the searches recorded in your research log. So the entering your log could be a link to that quick tree and a summary of what you learned in the notes column instead of all the searches. So often, you know, I like to just use those hints and and add things to fill out the pedigree. And it’s much easier just to put a link to that tree than putting every one of those searches.

Diana Elder (36m 54s):
So I like to use the research log to do the harder things where the hints don’t really tell you much. So different ways you can fill that out,

Nicole Elder Dyer (37m 5s):
Right? So you may have a lot of entries for just one specific DNA match like you mentioned. And then you might also have entries just specifically about your test takers, whether it’s your parents or one of your first cousins. And this is becomes even more important when you’re using the test results of relatives who are a little more distant, like second, third cousins whose pedigrees are more unfamiliar to you. And really understanding the depth of their pedigree is important because you may be comparing them to other matches trying to find out the common ancestor. You might even decide that you need to work on just building your test taker’s family tree a little further back to check it for accuracy, but also to help it be more complete so that you are finding all the possibilities for common ancestors between them and their matches so that you don’t get lettuce astray.

Nicole Elder Dyer (37m 52s):
And you can include this research in your log and you may want to have just a master family tree to build their tree. And then you can just add, you know, a simple entry to your log with a link to their profile in that tree. You can learn more about creating master trees in our podcast episode about chapter three.

Diana Elder (38m 10s):
Great. Now, I mentioned earlier that you could keep track of the DNA tools that you’re using in your research and this is really important so that you know exactly what you’ve done and don’t forget. So some of the tools that you might want to log would be leads, color clustering results, cluster reports, chromosome browsers, chromosome mapping, results segment triangulation data, surname projects, one-to-one, DNA comparisons, segment searches, ancestry through lines analysis, my heritage theory of relativity analysis, haplogroup reports, diagrams and wado. What are the odds? So there are a lot of different tools and a lot of different things that we use.

Diana Elder (38m 52s):
So what you want to do is make sure that you’re tracking what you are doing for those. So let’s just do an example. So for instance, if you are working with an adoptee and looking for birth parents, you might be making a lucid chart showing maternal and paternal matches. And then you go over to wado, what are the odds to test the hypothesis? And so then you could put that into your log and explain the results and your conclusions and that would help you to keep track of your work. So we recommend that you do this with all the different tools that you try so that you can track your activities and then you can remember how you did it and the different parameters you put in.

Diana Elder (39m 39s):
You know, did you use 90 to 400 cent Morgans for your lead chart like Dana leads recommends or did you decide to go a little bit lower? It’s really helpful to keep track of those details

Nicole Elder Dyer (39m 50s):
Right? And then sometimes when you don’t understand a concept or some kind of result from a DNA N company, you may be consulting some kind of book or article at the ISO Wiki. And so for this DNA informational material where you’re getting helpful context to help understand the testing results, it’s important to track that in the log two because you’re going to wanna include that in your research report. So reviewing D n A informational material is like searching for tax law information in a Tennessee book of statutes from the 18 hundreds. It’s helping you understand what you’re seeing in the record. And so we want to provide that valuable context for the readers of our report or our proof argument as well.

Nicole Elder Dyer (40m 33s):
Sometimes you may look in the ancestry d n a white paper or a book articles online, there’s all kinds of helpful information out there, so it’s helpful to keep track of that.

Diana Elder (40m 45s):
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Diana Elder (41m 25s):
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Nicole Elder Dyer (41m 46s):
Let’s talk now about how to use your research log. Now that we’ve covered kind of what things you can keep in your log, it’s important to think about how to use it. So first you’re gonna set up your log and each separate research log for each objective can have that objective clearly written at the top of the spreadsheet or in the description of the database. And in Airtable there’s an area at the top where you can expand that and include your objective. It’s important to have a focused objective and just include DNA n a matches that are relevant to that project. And then after you set up your log with the objective, you follow your research plan and add entries to your log for each result from documentary sources and d n sources and methods.

Nicole Elder Dyer (42m 30s):
So of course we want to include the D N A tools that we’ve tried and what we learned from them. Sometimes you might even put in your research plan directly into your research log spreadsheet so that you can just follow the plan there and then log the results. And then as you go along, you may have some records that yield longer information where you need to abstract or create a transcription and you can add that to a separate document that kind of helps you write as you go and prepare for making your research report.

Diana Elder (43m 1s):
Well, another thing that you want to add would be the full R URL for each research log entry. And the link may be to a census record, a profile at an online family tree, a white d n a project, a list of search results and for reports that you save to your computer, like auto cluster reports or screenshots of match pages, network graphs, you can include a link to them in your Google Drive or Dropbox account. So we use Google Drive and each file that we sync to the cloud is given its own url. And that’s really helpful to just put that right into your research log. Or you could just have a path to the file folder on your computer that contains the file.

Diana Elder (43m 41s):
But basically it’s helping you remember where you put that very important report somewhere on your computer. The URL column is tremendously useful for quickly returning to online records. And I used to use shorteners like Bitly, but I have found it’s much easier just to copy the full URL into the cell, the spreadsheet log, and then you can format the cell. So the URL either wraps around or clips and that’s if you’re using a spreadsheet like Excel or Google rather than overflowing over into the next cell with Airtable, it just takes up whatever you can see and you can adjust your roads and your table to be short or tall and you can do that in spreadsheets as well.

Diana Elder (44m 23s):
So I find it easier just to put the whole URL in and then don’t have to worry about any shortening programs.

Nicole Elder Dyer (44m 28s):
Yeah. And then next you’ll put in a source citation and creating your source citation right when you examine the source is a really good practice and it gets easier with practice, but your log should have a column for that citation. And we have a previous episode that talks all about making source citations, so you can go listen to that, but it’s a really good idea to make the full source citation for your documentary resources the moment you look at them. And this helps you understand the record and it really helps with writing the research report so that you have your citations all ready to go. And your log also should include entries where you found nothing. And so you’ll have negative source citations showing your negative search results.

Nicole Elder Dyer (45m 12s):
And usually it’s best to write the citation when you first do the search and not later when you write the report, although sometimes that happens to the best of us. But it helps to include the pertinent information about what you searched for to avoid duplication of effort in the future. So usually that citation will say something like, negative search for Joseph, Anthony, blah, blah, blah. When you’re doing a lot of research in published family trees to try to extend one of your DNA matches tree, sometimes you may want to create an abbreviated entry in the citation column. Usually the most important thing to save at that point is a link to the profile of the person that you’re extending the family tree for in that ancestor’s profile.

Nicole Elder Dyer (45m 53s):
And then in the published tree. And so usually I’ll just kind of include like the name of the person and their ID number, like if it’s the family search family tree and then later I might decide I want to have a full citation to put in my report. But often I don’t put all of that into my report. It’s just kind of a finding aid to help me figure out if they have a common ancestor. And so I don’t always wanna make a full citation for that type of search, but for documentary records that I know I’m going to use in the report and for most everything else, I do put that full citation in,

Diana Elder (46m 27s):
Right? I think the difference is just the sheer volume of DNA matches we might be trying to record and their trees, those are kind of infinite, right? And there’s just so many sources that we’re gonna actually search in the documents. So I’m the same way for the documents. I always do the full citation right off the bat. Another column that you’ll want to fill out is the abstract or summary of results. And this is where you put what you found either in the record or what you discovered with the DNA tool. For documentary sources, this is usually an abstract of information in the record and if it’s something that’s large like a, a very large estate file, then I will do a full transcription in a separate document and I use Google Docs.

Diana Elder (47m 10s):
So then the URL can go right there in the results column. And I also like to do an abstract of important things from the estate file or the deed or what have you, but I do like to have my link to the transcription right there. And then for DNA tools, you can summarize what you discovered in the results column. And if you’re analyzing cluster charts and you have several different relevant clusters, you could have a separate row for what you learn about each cluster. For instance, you know this is this common ancestor or this is cluster eight, it’s orange, it includes this person who’s a descendant of this couple. And so you can start getting some information and recording that in your summary of results so you know what happened in that report.

Nicole Elder Dyer (47m 56s):
Another column is for your own comments about what was found. And so it’s important to kind of keep this separate from what the record says. So in the summary of results or the abstract, that would be just strictly what the record says and then the notes and comments are your thoughts about them and your ideas for maybe what to do next. So it’s a good kind of place to keep track of questions you have and any conflicting information, any ideas for correlation between records can go there.

Diana Elder (48m 26s):
Right now as you’re researching, you can download your documents right when you’re looking at them and attach the citation to it. It’s really nice if you’re trying to stay within a time limit, like in client work that you just do your documents as you go. If you leave them all to the end, sometimes that can take an extra two or three hours and then that eats into your into your time. But one good program to use for attaching the image to the document is a program like Canva, an image editing program. And that can be really fast and easy to use. You create your citation in your log and then you can quickly just attach it to the image, put it in your files, and then you can give those documents a number.

Diana Elder (49m 10s):
When we write a report, we generally reference a document with a document number and in the research log that can correspond to the same number in your research report. And usually we do that at the end of a client project so that the numbers can be in order. So then you can sort your research log by the document number and and have all the sources with documents that you’ll be using in your report right together. So if you’re just researching for yourself, not going to be doing this for a client, you may not want to use document numbers instead, maybe this column could be a reminder to download the image and rename it and save it to your folder. So it’s just something to think about how you want to deal with the documents as you are doing your research, entering them into your research log.

Diana Elder (49m 53s):
If you are saving those to your computer and we do recommend that you do, then make sure you have some type of an organization system such as surname, then the person with that surname, and then that’s where you would put all of their documents. So we create a separate folder within our genealogy folder for DNA data, and then there’s a folder for each test taker with raw DNA files, DNA reports, cluster analysis and so forth. So it’s just important to get organized with our files for both the DNA data and the documents for our ancestors.

Nicole Elder Dyer (50m 25s):
As you add entries to your log, you may may come across patterns or clues, and so you may notice the same surname or location may appear in several of your matches. And the great thing about having your detailed research log is the ability to search through your log to find associated information. You can use control F to search within it with Airtable, you can use filters, you can also do sorting and grouping within your log to help you draw out relevant information. And it’s just really a wonderful way to find exactly what you’re looking for and that can assist you in writing your report too.

Diana Elder (50m 59s):
Now, as you’re doing your research and filling out your log, we encourage you to write as you go so you can write some conclusions as you’re coming across those and you can put those in your research project document, which is a great place to keep track of what you’re doing as your research.

Nicole Elder Dyer (51m 15s):
Alright, so now that you have created a research log and you’re ready to follow your research plan, go ahead and follow your plan, record your searches in the log, include the url, make the source citation, summarize what you learned, and write your notes and analysis and next steps in your log or in your research project document. And it’ll be helpful to kind of write as you go in your research project document or your final report so that you don’t have so much writing to do at the very end. So good luck as you tried doing a research log this week, and we encourage you to try out Airtable. And if you’d like to learn how to use Airtable better, we have a great tutorial within our online course research like a Pro with dna, so you can learn that.

Nicole Elder Dyer (52m 1s):
And of course, our Airtable guide, which is a guide for using Airtable for genealogy research logs.

Diana Elder (52m 7s):
All right, good luck everyone on your research this week, and we’ll talk to you next time.

Nicole Elder Dyer (52m 12s):
All right, bye

Diana Elder (52m 13s):
Bye-bye.

Nicole Elder Dyer (52m 14s):
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 book sellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family lock.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@familylock.com slash newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each of you and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to research like a pro.