RLP 300: RLP Past, Present, and Future

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 300 Research Like a Pro Past Present, and Future. 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 genealogist 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):
Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com, your go-to resource for unlocking the stories of your ancestors. Hi everyone, welcome to Research Like a Pro

Diana (52s):
Hi Nicole How are you doing today?

Nicole (54s):
Hey mom, I’ve been learning about using AI and I’ve recently just really had the question like, when is it a good idea to use generative text models, like large language models, chat GPT, and when is it not a good idea and when do we need to disclose our use of AI writing assistance from these models? So I’ve been doing a lot of research on that and learning about how to cite an artificial intelligence chat bot and You know whether or not we need to include the model number and the date and the user because it responds differently to different users. So just diving into all that, and I’ve been learning a lot.

Diana (1m 35s):
That’s so interesting. You know, this just reminds me so much of when DNA just came out and everyone was trying to figure out how best to use it responsibly, and we’ve come so far with DNA standards and really some set methodologies and I’m sure that’s where we will eventually get with AI also. But it’s fun to be in at the beginning, isn’t it?

Nicole (1m 55s):
It is. It’s exciting. Well, what have you been working on?

Diana (1m 59s):
I’ve been working on my client project and right now in the study group we’re experimenting with different tools to use for creating clusters or networks and I just tried a brand new one that was fun and it was a Microsoft Excel Workbook created by a user to semi-automate grabbing all your matches and shared matches and then putting them into this Workbook and then it generates your leads chart for you and then you do a little manipulating. So I thought that was really neat and I learned about this because the developer emailed and, you know just said, maybe you’d like to try this.

Diana (2m 42s):
His name is David. And so I am just always so open to hearing new people’s ideas about how to make something easier in my life. And so this one was great. I’ll read the URL for anybody who wants to go try it out. It’s called the Ancestry DNA Match Downloader, and it was created by David Nowotnik, N-O-W-O-T-N-I-K. So David, if you’re listening, I hope that I said that name sort of correct. And this was part of the Colleyville Genealogy Society. The URL is kind of long. I think we’ll just put it in the show notes that’ll make it easier.

Diana (3m 22s):
But he has a YouTube video with a presentation about it and instructions and the actual Workbook. So there you go. It’s kind of fun to learn something new.

Nicole (3m 32s):
That’s great. You know it’s kind of a pain to have to type out all the names of the matches for the Leeds Method, so anything that makes that easier is great.

Diana (3m 42s):
Yes. All right, so let’s do our announcements. We have our Airtable Quick Reference second edition guide and tracking DNA matches with Airtable. So we’d invite you to go check those out. If you’ve been thinking about using Airtable and you really want to try it, those guides really guide you through. They’re, they’re guides, they guide you through what to do, they’re awesome. And then we have our Research Like a Pro Webinar Series for 2024 ongoing. And our next Webinar will be April 16th. That’s a Tuesday at 11:00 AM Mountain Time. This will be presented by Alice Childs, and the title is Parents of Maria Terwilliger in New York, and it’s a DNA case study, So.

Diana (4m 22s):
if you’ve done any type of New York research, you recognize how difficult that is. And so you can learn about how Alice used DNA with gephi network graphs and how she was able to make progress on them. Our next study group will be this fall and it will be based on documentary work. So. if you’re interested in getting started with the study group, it’s an excellent way to get started. And many of our people do the fall study group in preparation for the DNA study group, which is always in the spring. And we do have peer group leader applications on our website if you’re interested in helping us with that. As always, join the newsletter for coupons for our different projects when they go on sale.

Diana (5m 3s):
And we are excited about upcoming conferences. I will be at the Ohio Genealogical Society Conference and when this podcast airs, I’ll be there this week. So I’m looking forward to visiting Sandusky, Ohio. Never been there in person and it will be fun to see new friends there. And then Nicole and I will both be presenting virtually for the National Genealogical Society Conference, which is taking place in May.

Nicole (5m 30s):
And I’ve already recorded my whole lecture for that, which was a challenge to do, but it’s done now. So I’m looking forward to being there for the Q and A for that, and it should be a fun virtual conference. Our listener Spotlight today is titled Love This Show. I absolutely love the content of this show. Been listening for at least a year. The genealogical research is done so carefully and well shared. I will say I often listen to Podcasts while I’m out and about gym, commute, and I would maybe point out that the volume seems much lower than other podcasts. Perhaps a tweak in the audio might be in order. And we did get a couple comments about that when a couple of our episodes had some quiet volume levels.

Nicole (6m 12s):
So we’ve been working with our editor to fix that and making sure that our microphones are working well and made a couple tweaks with our microphones, so hopefully the volume is good enough now so that you can hear as you’re walking the dog and going to the gym, doing the commute. We hear from so many of you at Roots Tech and other conferences that you listen while you’re taking your walks. So I’m glad that you guys are all taking walks and getting out and listening to Podcasts at the same time. Way too multitask.

Diana (6m 42s):
Well, that’s exactly what I do. Listening to podcasts or books on tape or audio books, whatever you wanna call it, it’s such a great way to spend some good time listening and learning.

Nicole (6m 52s):
Well, they used to be called Books on Tape when we were taking our road trips back in the day.

Diana (6m 57s):
That’s right. So I just keep calling them that

Nicole (6m 59s):
Books on CD, I think is how we listened to them during my childhood.

Diana (7m 4s):
Yeah, well, I had some cassette tapes that were books, then we went to CDs and now they’re just streamed, which is so much easier.

Nicole (7m 12s):
It’s so funny how things change. That’s a good segue into our topic today, which we thought would be fun to do for our 300th episode of Research Like a Pro, a Past Present and Future episode about Research Like a Pro, and kind of about our own genealogy research and how we started out and how we’re currently doing things and what we think the future might hold for researching like a pro and kind of our methodology So. we are gonna cover a few different areas in this episode. We’ll talk about technology tools that we used in the past that we use now and that might come out in the future, Genealogy Methods, past, present, and Future, DNA, past present, and Future, and even a little bit of productivity tools from the past and now and in the future.

Nicole (7m 57s):
So this should be a fun episode for our 300th episode of Research Like a Pro, and we will start with the past.

Diana (8m 5s):
All right, so the past, and probably some of you listening will be able to relate to some of these things that we did. We didn’t really start genealogy too long ago. We started in 2003, and you probably heard me tell my story about how my dad turned everything over to me and and gave it all to me in a suitcase at the Salt Lake City Airport. And then from there, Nicole and I started filling out the old personal ancestral file, which is where you put your family tree. And we would make trips up to the Family History library and lookups books. We’d find a county and lookups all the surname mentions of our ancestors and then try to correlate that and put that into the tree.

Diana (8m 49s):
And at the time, we really just used our program on our own computer. It wasn’t online yet. And then we would upload it to Roots Web. And that was fun because that was out on the web You know that was kind of scary. You put all your research out there. But from that, we had other people that would email us and share their family trees by GEDcom. Remember those days, Nicole, when we would get a GEDcom of somebody’s tree and we would look at that and compare and maybe add it to our tree.

Nicole (9m 22s):
I remember importing a lot of GEDcom files and just adding them

Diana (9m 27s):
to my tree. Yeah, yeah. We made a lot of connections with cousins that way and filled out our tree fairly well. And it wasn’t too much longer after that FamilySearch started putting out their tree. And of course that’s gone through so many iterations, but we were there right at the beginning when that started. And we would work on that, try to figure out how, how to work with that and compared our personal ancestral file with what was on FamilySearch, so it was fun to see that change and come about. And then we moved from PAF, personal ancestral file, to Ancestral Quest and started using that because it had a collaboration tool.

Diana (10m 11s):
And so I could work on the file, I would actually check it out and I’d work on it, and then I’d check it back in and then Al could check it out from wherever you were living at the time and work on it. So that was really neat. We were able to work on the same files and not be redundant with our work.

Nicole (10m 28s):
Yeah, that was great for when I moved away from home and I was at college and when we weren’t living in the same house anymore, because when we first started and used PAF and FamilySearch, I was living at home as a teenager,

Diana (10m 40s):
Right? We were just doing all of our work on one computer. We just take turns Whenever we were working, You know we were keeping our research logs. We had paper files. I had set up our surname, locality paper files, and we would write down things that we were finding. We didn’t really use them like real research logs like we do now. We basically used them as a table of contents for that paper folder where we would put all the things that we’d find, remember, we’d print off the census and annotate it. I still have a lot of those folders that I haven’t got all the way cleaned out.

Nicole (11m 16s):
I love how we would use a red pencil to circle or annotate the name of the person on the census page and then write their name along the top. We had a good paper filing system for all the things we found

Diana (11m 28s):
We did. And as I’m going through those, I am pretty impressed with how we did it because I can still see what we did in our methodology and our thoughts. And so it’s good. And when we’d go up to the library, we’d photocopy pages out of books and we put those in there. So You know, we did good research with the tools that we had at the time. And I remember even experimenting a little bit further down the road when I started doing Accreditation for my research slog. Then I was moving towards really doing a real research slog and created the Google Sheet research slog that we taught for Research Psycho Pro at the beginning. And I even experimented with research ties, which was an online research log for a bit to see if I liked that You know.

Diana (12m 14s):
So I was in that phase of really seeing what worked best, but You know, settled on the Google Sheets, my own research log is what I really liked best at that time.

Nicole (12m 23s):
Yeah, that was great. And it’s too bad that research ties has gone away now, but I was talking to the developer, Jill Crandall, and she was saying that it was hard to keep it up with all the hackers and the different attacks from spam bots and things, so she had to end it.

Diana (12m 39s):
That’s such a shame too, because that was a neat program. I was really grateful that I was able to download everything that I had inputted into that as a spreadsheet, You know, an Excel spreadsheet. And so then I didn’t lose my data, which was a great thing. And also research ties had a capability to link to FamilySearch, and so I could also You know the click of the button, get my research added as a source. And so I did that a bit. I was able to preserve everything I had put into it, which I appreciate. ’cause it’s not very fun to lose all of your work. So even though it went away, I still preserved the months of work that I used that program for.

Nicole (13m 17s):
Right.

Diana (13m 18s):
Well, another thing that we started doing, or at least I think maybe I did more than you did was I started using Evernote because I was trying to figure out what to do with all of the material I was getting from conferences, You know in the way of handouts and syllabi, blog posts, all of this information. And it probably started when I was doing Accreditation because I wanted to gather all the information on researching, say in Texas or in Georgia or in Florida, or how to research census records, You know all of that type of learning that you do when you’re getting ready to take a test in an area that you really want to gather everything.

Diana (13m 58s):
And I needed a good way to organize that. And I started using Evernote and create a note and created notebooks for these different areas and tag them. And I really loved that. That was so fun, such a, such a good way for me to organize all that information that I needed to know.

Nicole (14m 17s):
Yeah, that was a great tool. And I like Evernote a lot. I don’t really use it that much now, but I did use it at the time as well.

Diana (14m 24s):
Yeah, and I think you maybe added some things to mine. I can’t remember if we shared or what if we were using the same computer at the time. Can’t remember exactly how that worked.

Nicole (14m 34s):
No, we weren’t using the same computer, but we did share some notebooks.

Diana (14m 38s):
Okay. That’s what we did. That’s right. You could share notebooks. Yeah. So I use it still, and I primarily use it for saving a great blog post. Now I’m getting most of my learning on the internet. If I find a good article or a good blog post, I’ll save it. But then also when I am stuck with a problem, You know and I think, oh, I, I remember going to a class about such and such, and then I will go and log into my Evernote account and start doing some searching and I can pretty quickly find syllabi or articles that I’ve saved about that specific item, which is really nice. And you might wonder, okay, well can’t you just do that on Google? Well, you can, but you have to wade through a lot of results that maybe you didn’t want to.

Diana (15m 21s):
And so I have found that it’s just really helpful to have my own little database there in Evernote.

Nicole (15m 27s):
Yeah.

Diana (15m 29s):
Another thing that we did in the past, first of all, let’s talk about file organizations. So as I mentioned, we had our paper files and then eventually we started getting more organized with our digital files. But it took a while. I would say we used paper files for many, many years before we actually got got organized with our digital files. But for our Genealogy, Methods, our methodology, things we would actually do for research, as I mentioned, we’d go up to the library and photocopy all the book indexes and the records we could find, and then we’d come home and put those in the files, try to figure out what information we could get from those to put into our family tree. But then the other website, if you remember, was USGenWeb® that we really liked.

Diana (16m 14s):
That was kind of a big thing at the time. And we did a lot of research using USGenWeb®.

Nicole (16m 21s):
Yeah, it was really great to have those volunteer sites and to be able to find things that weren’t on FamilySearch or Ancestry yet because they were just starting out and find more things that related to specific localities.

Diana (16m 35s):
Right. I think some of the things that I really appreciated were when these specific counties or states would put up cemetery listings and you could go try to find your ancestor in the cemetery. That was so nice because find a grave hadn’t really kicked in yet either. And so those were some of the first things that we could use online, which was great. And then of course, the censuses had been put online and we loved searching for the censuses, searching for our family and every census. And we would find all the indications of our surname in a county and print those off and try to figure out how they connected. And so as a result, I have a lot of paper folders full of censuses that I need to, I need to keep throwing, throwing out because now those are online and attached a different way.

Nicole (17m 24s):
Yes, they are all online now,

Diana (17m 27s):
But You know, of course, we still did a lot of writing letters, writing emails, and I corresponded with several people at courthouses or in county societies, You know to get some information from them. And I remember sending off death certificates and being so excited when I got Cynthia Dillard’s maiden name that came from three death certificates of her children. And before that, we had no idea who Cynthia was. And I sent for those. And it was fun to see that Dillard’s surname mentioned in those three death certificates. So, we don’t perhaps do as much actual sending for records now, but we still do You know a fair amount.

Diana (18m 11s):
There are some things you just can only get by writing for it or emailing for it. But we did do a fair amount of that back in the day to supplement the online research and research at the library we were doing.

Nicole (18m 23s):
Right. Yeah. I think you did all the correspondence. I didn’t do a whole lot in the beginning.

Diana (18m 29s):
Probably not. ’cause you were a teenager.

Nicole (18m 32s):
Actually. I did. You did encourage me to write letters to our Schultz cousins and Aunt Helen and Steph. So that was actually really neat to write those letters and get the responses about the Schultz relatives, about great grandparents and stuff.

Diana (18m 46s):
Yes, that’s right. You did because you did a project on my grandmother, Eddie Bell Harris that I never knew. And you reached out to her children and had them fill out a little form and write their memories. And I treasure that because those people are all deceased now. And so that was so great that you did that as a teenager. Well, let’s move on to DNA So. we were there right at the beginning of DNA. We had just really started putting together our tree, and it was because I put the tree out on Roots web that I was contacted by a Roystons descendant. And I had put together the Roystons all the way from Thomas Roystons who arrived in Virginia in 1625 down to my Roystons.

Diana (19m 28s):
And I put it out there very confidently on Roots web. And I kind of chuckle at that because You know we think that what we put out there is right. I’d done all this research at the library and put things together and, and this Royston gentleman emailed and said, well, your stuff looks pretty good, but it doesn’t agree all the time with what the other Virginia Roystons have put together. And I was so surprised. There are other people who are researching this family. I can’t believe it. I’m not the only one or the first one. You know it was, it was eyeopening for me. And looking back, I just laugh at that. But he invited me to be part of their YDNA study and YDNA had come out and people were using that to try to see if their documentary research was correct.

Diana (20m 11s):
And because there were two branches of Roystons, one from Maryland and one from Virginia, and they both had branches that moved into the Southern United States. And they wanted to know, well, how do you know you’re really part of our Virginia Branch? And so I asked my dad, and he had a cousin who could take the YDNA test. He was a direct line Royston. And we matched them and then they welcomed me into their research group. And we had, gosh, probably several years, I’m gonna say maybe three, four or five years, where we researched together and shared information via email and really made good strides on getting all of that research put together.

Diana (20m 53s):
So that was a really neat opportunity for me right at the beginning to jump into YDNA. And then kind of a similar thing happened with autosomal DNA, because I had been researching the coxes and thought that my Rachel was the daughter of Benjamin Cox. So I emailed another Cox researcher and she said, no, no, Rachel’s not a daughter, but you should do ancestry DNA, and then we can compare and see if we match segments over on GEDMatch. So I did the ancestry DNA test and You know. Lo and behold, we did match on a segment, but nobody else would upload a GEDMatch So. we could see if we triangulated on a segment to prove that.

Diana (21m 33s):
And so then of course, years later, I did a big project on proving that. But that was my motivation for starting with autosomal DNA was trying again, to prove something that I thought the document showed.

Nicole (21m 46s):
Right. That is amazing that we started to use autosomal DNA and it was so helpful.

Diana (21m 51s):
And You know at the beginning, we were always really interested to see what our ethnicities were and our ethnicity estimates then were not quite as accurate as they are getting to be now. And I remember people would kind of make fun of them and say, oh, this doesn’t even make sense. And so now we know so much more about how it works and realize that, yeah, it’s getting better. But it was fun to see that. And it’s still fun to look at our ethnicity estimate. It’s fun to see how it’s evolving.

Nicole (22m 23s):
Right. And at that time, You know when I first started learning about DNA, I remember just focusing on getting the oldest generation tested thinking I’ll learn how to use it later. So that ended up being a really good plan. ’cause I got three out of four of our grandparents tested and a couple other older individuals in our family, a great uncle and others. So I just was kinda getting started.

Diana (22m 46s):
I know. And I’m so grateful you did that. The one grandparent that you miss was my dad. And he had passed away really just kind of on the cusp of ancestry DNA, becoming a thing. I possibly would’ve had the opportunity to have him take a test, but it was just right there at the beginning. And I miss that. So at least we have my mother. And so that helps to narrow down matches if they don’t match her. They’re certainly on my dad’s side. so it is what it is. And let’s for our final little section on what we did in the past for productivity, You know everyone listening knows we love productivity tools and we had some really high tech productivity tools back in the day, and that was a research notebook and our paper notes, that’s what we used and the clock You know I would set a goal to research in the mornings before the kids got up.

Diana (23m 41s):
It was usually like six to 7:00 AM before my crazy day with children began. And I just kept track of my little paper notebook, which I still have to this day. I think I have three of them filled up now about what I was doing that day and what I wanted to do very next. And it kept me on track. It was so great. And then of course when we had all those hypotheses, we would write those down on paper, draw out our little charts and diagrams. And I still have some of those too. It’s so fun to go back and look at the notes and think about how we were trying to puzzle all this out and using paper.

Nicole (24m 16s):
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Nicole (24m 57s):
Use promo code, FamilyLocket it for a 20% discount on your subscription. That’s FamilyLocket at newspapers.com. Sign up today@newspapers.com and embark on a journey of discovery. Well, now we’re going to talk about the present day for Research Like a Pro. And the tools that we use and kind of the technology that we currently are using for our family tree tool is family tree Maker. And that kind of happened as we started really using DNA more, we started using ancestry trees at the same time, more for a lot of different reasons. But ancestry trees make it really easy to have You know your private tree that no one can change and also take advantage of historical record hints at the same time. So, we kind of started using those a lot.

Nicole (25m 38s):
And then the one that really corresponds well with that is the Family Tree Maker program because it automatically sinks with your ancestry tree. So that’s kinda what we use now. And of course for online trees, we still use FamilySearch to post our conclusions and we’ve started using Wiki Tree because of all of their great tools and their great DNA tools to be able to find other people to collaborate with. And then a big change has happened with our research Logs So. we started off with research Logs being papers at the front of our folders. And then Mom, you started using Google Sheets and I started with Google Sheets as well. But over the years when we started adding DNA matches to our evidence, we realized that we needed something a little more powerful and flexible.

Nicole (26m 18s):
And that’s where we added in Airtable research logs. And that has been such a wonderful tool. And of course You know that we recommend it and love it. So that’s a little different and it’s definitely a different tool. It’s a relational database, but it still has that familiar look of a spreadsheet. So it’s got a lot of familiar features with some additional superpowers.

Diana (26m 39s):
Right. And I think Airtable has probably been one of the biggest steps forward we have made with Research Psycho Pro because it just makes us so much more efficient and lets us get our data in there in a way that we can really analyze it better. So it’s fun to think about how much better our research is because of this great tool.

Nicole (27m 2s):
Right. And I was thinking back to when we used to use Google Docs to write all our research reports and stuff, and at least I did at the beginning. And then now we almost exclusively use Microsoft Word for our word processor. And that’s what we use for our client research. And it just has some better reference note footnote type tools and styles and things that are just a little bit more powerful.

Diana (27m 25s):
Yeah, it, it helps when you’re trying to do professional work. And I think for anyone trying to write Really good reports, there’s some features that make it really, really nice.

Nicole (27m 36s):
As far as notes, you still use Evernote. I really just use Google Drive for all of my handouts and things like that as well as all of my files on ancestors. So Google Drive is my favorite. I love the Google Drive streaming, which allows you to have access to all of your online files on all your devices, but it only downloads it to your hard drive when you use it. so it doesn’t take up as much space as Google backup and zinc used to do. Now with our file organization, we have gotten rid of a lot of the papers. We don’t print the censuses anymore, we just keep the digital files, we download them to a folder, we track it in our table research log, and we can add shortcuts to all the different ancestor folders and Google Drive so that we only have to store it once

Diana (28m 19s):
You know what, that has been the best thing ever. I love that because I work on a laptop, I work on a desktop, sometimes I work on my husband’s laptop or his desktop or at your home on your desktop. And being able to get all of my information right there on Google Drive is so great because I’ll have any ancestor I can lookups and find out all the information I have on them. I can look at any report. Yeah, it’s, it’s really wonderful to have Google Drive and be able to have that on any computer you’re working with as well as my phone. I can find anything on my phone as well.

Nicole (28m 56s):
Right, exactly. And some of the other technology tools that we like right now are some different AI tools like Grammarly that can help write blog posts and help with emails. Well, it doesn’t write them, but it helps with checking the grammar for anything that we’re writing. So I know you love to use that. And then we also have Canva, which we use all the time for organizing images, creating images, blog posts, header images, putting annotations on images. It’s just a really great tool.

Diana (29m 25s):
It is. And I think sometimes we forget about how wonderful these tools are because I’ll be writing an email and Grammarly will suggest all the things that I’ve messed up on and I just have to say, okay. And then it makes, makes my emails not have terrible errors. And then You know we’ve all done those dumb things where we’re writing and it’s nice to know that somebody is checking up on me and I’m not going to send off something to a client that is kind of ridiculous. So I’m still proofread myself, but it’s nice to have something that highlights it. Yeah.

Nicole (29m 55s):
Well, as far as Genealogy Methods and how they’ve evolved from the past to the present, we really use a couple different websites now. We use the FamilySearch Wiki a lot and that has been such a great tool that has been developed to help us with locality research and understanding record availability in particular locations. And then of course, we use the FamilySearch Catalog quite a bit more. And in the past we would kind of go to the FamilySearch Library and go to our county and state area and look at all the books there and just look in the indexes. And now we really just focus on using the online FamilySearch Catalog to see what’s available. And now that they’ve digitized almost all of the microphones, they’re, well, they have digitized all of them, but not all of them are actually available from your own home.

Nicole (30m 42s):
But now that those are available, it’s so much easier to do research in other record groups outside of the FamilySearch Library. You know we can even use the FamilySearch books where they’ve digitized so many of the books as well to do a lot of the research we have used to have to do on site at the Family History library in Salt Lake City. So that’s been a amazing to be able to do that. And You know whenever there’s a record that we need from a different location like Tennessee or Texas, South Carolina, California where we don’t live, we have really just become familiar with hiring researchers using contacts that we’ve found through networking or through the Association of Professional Genealogist website, a PG to find people who can go pull those records for us.

Nicole (31m 29s):
So that’s been great to add in additional records that aren’t online. And we’ve really just started becoming so much more familiar with tax records, land records, probate, all of those record groups that we were kind of unfamiliar with at the beginning when we were focused on census research and cemeteries. And now we feel just like so much more used to using some of those more difficult records like land and tax.

Diana (31m 58s):
That’s so true. I remember thinking, why would I look at probate because none of my ancestors had probate records. You know. That’s kind of a fallacy. And once I started doing client work and I realized how many people are actually named in probate records, whether they left a will or not, You know, it was just the new level of of research that we could do. And then the tax records and land of course have been amazing, especially in the South where all of our difficult research tends to be. so it is fun to see how our methods have evolved and especially with the digitization of the records by FamilySearch and availability really of records everywhere. I’m even thinking of archives like the Library of Virginia that has so many records now available online and it’s truly amazing where we have come and the things we have available now for us

Nicole (32m 49s):
Right now. Moving on to DNA, where we had started with DNA was with YDNA and with just getting the oldest generation tested and in the last six to seven years we’ve really just learned so much about how to incorporate autosomal DNA and the other types of DNA into our own research and in our client projects and You know developing the Research Like a Pro at DNA process along with Robin was just such a wonderful experience to think about how we can use DNA in every step of the Research Like a Pro process, and really learning about how to use genetic networks and doing the leads method and then the automated methods of clustering and learning about geffing network graphs and how to find clusters and connected clusters.

Nicole (33m 36s):
And there’s just been so many wonderful tools that have been developed by the DNA testing companies as well as third party tools. And we’ve tried so many of them and and one thing that’s really stood out to me over the last several years is how important it is to increase the coverage of the research subject by getting additional test takers to share their DNA. And the collaboration that has happened with some of our research projects has really made it possible to solve more distant research questions, which is exciting. What are the Odds tool came out? And that was so exciting to use to help solve adoption cases and just learning how to get in all the DNA databases to find matches that may only be in one site.

Nicole (34m 18s):
All of those things have really just made it possible to have so many more discoveries with autosomal DNA.

Diana (34m 25s):
Absolutely. And I look back and I think about how little we knew at the beginning, right? We, we thought we knew some stuff, but You know because we teach this and we work with it all the time in our client work, in our own research, you just really learn by doing when it comes to DNA and it’s exciting to see how far we’ve come and we’re excited to see where it’s going to go. And it’s fun to think about how we’re getting more and more people in the testing databases. So, we have just a huge pool say at Ancestry, over 25 million people there to work with. And we started with such a small pool. So it’s neat. And then we can think about ethnicity and I just taught this lesson in our study group and every time I do it, every year I have to go and see what’s new with all the companies with their ethnicity.

Diana (35m 15s):
And every single time Ancestry has added more reference populations, they are just getting more and more places that they have defined and they’re adding more genetic communities. So our results are getting quite a bit better. And I did a poll in that lesson for our study group members to see You know, are your results pretty accurate? Do they agree with your documentary research or not? And for the most part, most people said yes. They are now agreeing with documents. And so that’s kind of fun to see how ethnicity estimates have evolved through the years.

Nicole (35m 49s):
So true. And it’s also been fun to see how YDNA testing has taken off with family tree DNA’s databases and You know starting out with a Y 37 test for my direct line, my husband’s line. And then we upgraded that to Y one 11 and then to the big Y, and we got a match at the Y one 11 level with the same surname. So that was exciting. So it’s been amazing. And the surname projects have grown and mitochondrial testing, we found different test takers to help us with those lines in our family. So there’s just been a lot more DNA test taking that’s been happening.

Diana (36m 26s):
Right. It’s been great. Well, and then in productivity tools, we have embraced some new tools and those have been really, really fun. I think one of the ones that’s been Really good for for me and that I teach and you have embraced too, is the Getting Things Done Method. And I have loved that whole methodology. It’s, it has really helped me to think of the next action to separate out projects and to just feel like I have a better handle on all the work coming in, so I don’t feel overwhelmed. So I’d love that. Then you introduced me to Trello boards, which has been really fun to again, try to separate things out into their different buckets and keep track of what the next action is.

Diana (37m 11s):
I use Google Keep, I think you introduced me to that one too. All these great tech tools you always introduce to me. And Google Keep is so fun with the ability to just write quick little notes or keep a little note here and there for something that you’ve discovered and you don’t wanna forget. Even like your virtual sticky notes. And then of course we use Toggle Nail to see how much time we’re spending. And it’s Really, good You know we really have to do this for client work, but it’s also really nice to track how much time you are spending, say on emails or on writing a blog post or recording a podcast. It’s fun just to see specifically where the time is going.

Diana (37m 52s):
And then of course, one of my favorite all time productivity tools is one tab, the extension for your browser where you can have all your windows open, you hit the little funnel icon and then all of those web pages are funneled down and into a list that you can reopen anytime you want to. And so that has been such a game changer since I’ll often have several tabs open. I don’t wanna lose all those, but I’ve gotta stop and do something else. So all those productivity tools have been wonderful to just keep my workday flowing and get more done in less time, I guess is is what I love.

Nicole (38m 34s):
Yeah, of course. We wanna be more efficient. Those help. Well, now our next section is about Research Like a Pro in the future and what are we going to use in the coming years? And it’s fun to kind of speculate and predict and think about what might happen. So with technology, what will our family tree tool be? We are currently using family tree Maker. I just did a presentation about comparing different tools and one that stood out to me was the Family Historian tool, which has some neat features like allowing you to have research notes that include tables and more word processing within the family tree program. So that one stood out to me as one that would be great for Research Like a Pro.

Diana (39m 16s):
Yeah. I don’t think that we should ever be stuck with just one one program. It’s always good to be open to thinking if there’s a better way.

Nicole (39m 24s):
Yeah. And for online trees, I’m sure that we’ll always continue to use FamilySearch, although you never know. But that one I’m pretty certain will be around forever with all of the effort and time and manpower behind FamilySearch. And it’s such a great place to add our conclusions and high quality reports and transcriptions and knowing that that will be preserved for future researchers.

Diana (39m 47s):
I agree. I always tell people, get your stuff on FamilySearch. Keep it in your own program as well in case someone changes it. But FamilySearch is going to be there for a long time.

Nicole (39m 57s):
Yeah. And then hopefully Ancestry Trees will remain around because they are so easy to build those quick trees for DNA research.

Diana (40m 4s):
Absolutely.

Nicole (40m 6s):
Well, with research logs, I am always on the lookout for any tools that might make things easier, simpler, more automated. With Airtable, they do have a new AI Companion or tool that goes along with it. So I’m looking forward to learning more about that and figuring out how artificial intelligence might be incorporated with Airtable to help automate citations or add more formulas. You know when you add a source to the research log table, maybe you could automatically have information from that row populate into the timeline without us having to think about it, which might defeat the purpose because we should be thinking about it. But just making some things a little bit more streamlined.

Nicole (40m 46s):
There’s also other tools out there. I tried out Notion today and it’s fun to revisit these tools that I’ve tried in the past and see how they work and integrating documents into the research log with Notion could be amazing. And they also have an AI tool that can help you and assist with writing with our word processors. I’m sure we’ll continue to use Word and Google Docs and all of these tools have new AI assistance within the word processor to assist with writing reports and things. So You know there’s a lot more automation and assistance coming up with all of these AI tools.

Diana (41m 25s):
There really is. Which reminds me how with our genealogy methodology for doing our research, the new FamilySearch hold tech search has been a game changer where we can put in a name and pull, it will find all the deeds or the probate that that name comes up in. And it is truly amazing. I just put in my John Klein the other day just for fun. And I had recently had a hypothesis that he was from Sangamon County, Illinois and it found a deed for him with his wife’s name. So I knew it was really him. And that was so fabulous. I mean, sure, I could have gone to the deed index and I would’ve found it that way, but how fun it was to just put that in filter by location and then be able to read it right then.

Diana (42m 13s):
So I’m sure we’re going to have so much more of this whole text searching in different databases that have been digitized that will really be game changing for us in finding the records.

Nicole (42m 25s):
So true. That one is just really exciting. And I think we’ll have a lot more Developments with searching handwritten text in the future. Well, what about DNA? What new tools do we expect with DNA? Well, some of the brand new things that are just coming out now and in the next couple of months are exciting. MyHeritage just announced that they will allow you to share your DNA results with collaborators, which is really helpful for client work. And I just feel like we’re going to have a lot more collaboration in the future as far as like being able to work with other descendants of our research subject, increasing the coverage by looking at the matches of, of our second cousins and, and working on all that, adding that together, having more test takers for a project.

Nicole (43m 13s):
And then I hope that the YDNA surname projects will become more collaborative as well, where we can have more tree information from all of the different test takers and be able to collaborate with them, get their email addresses. Whereas right now you have to go through the project admins. So I’m just hoping that that will get more collaborative and be a little bit more like Wiki Tree, where you can find descendants who have tested a a, a common ancestor and be able to view their entire line and work on documenting that. ’cause that’s so important. And I’m hoping more people will use Wiki Tree to add their DNA tests to that site. So that just simply stating that you’ve taken a certain test propagates to all the Ancestors that are relevant to it, and then you can collaborate.

Nicole (43m 56s):
I’m also hoping there will be more ways to easily download matches and shared matches, especially from Ancestry, and be able to work with those You know outside of Ancestry like in Gephi and things. Hopefully that will even within the testing platforms become more available. You know to be able to find descendants of a research subject like you can with Through lines and then kind of establish some kind of family group where you can work together. And there’s been a lot of talk about that at the last Roots Tech where FamilySearch and Ancestry are creating tools within their sites to be able to have family groups that are working on things collaboratively. So that’s exciting. And then of course there’s a lot of third party tools always being developed to help us work more efficiently with the DNA.

Nicole (44m 39s):
And one that I’m excited about that just came out is Banyan DNA that helps with pedigree, collapse and multiple relationships and, and maybe in the future will be able to help us with DNA and Inmy. So that’s hopefully something that will come soon. And so there’s just a lot of exciting things that could happen. And it does seem like the way things are going, it will be more along the lines of using shared matches because that allows us to incorporate so many more people into our DNA evidence pool than triangulation with segments does, because fewer people share the exact same segments while many people share DNA with each other who inherited it from a common ancestor, but maybe just on different segments.

Nicole (45m 27s):
But they still can be useful in our writing and our evidence.

Diana (45m 33s):
Absolutely. And it’s exciting to see what will be developed. I know there will be more people coming up with great ideas and we’ll be able to all benefit from those. Well, and of course in the future, I really hope to solve some of my brick walls with DNA. And my burning question still is who is Cynthia Dillard’s father? I’m hoping someday DNA will point the way to that. And then of course, I hope to just continue confirming ancestral lines and seeing how far I can push that genetic evidence back on the family tree. And like you’ve mentioned, having more coverage will help to do that because I may not have inherited that DNA from a distant ancestor, but one of my cousins might have.

Diana (46m 13s):
so it will be fun to see how much we can do with autosomal DNA. Of course, with mitochondrial and YDNA added in.

Nicole (46m 21s):
Right. And I, I have my two research projects I hope to someday solve George Welch, who were his parents and who were the parents of John Robert Dyer. So someday I’ll

Diana (46m 33s):
Be done someday. We’re gonna figure that out. And then of course, with productivity tools, I think there will be new things probably developed. I think the tools that we’re already using, we will see more and more automation with those. And perhaps there will be even one tool to rule them all. That will be the perfect tool for everything. Right? It’ll be fun to see and it’ll be exciting to learn and to keep growing in this field of genealogy, which is what we love.

Nicole (47m 4s):
Wonderful. Well Thank you all for listening as we had our 300th episode and talked about the past, present, and Future of our genealogy research and Research Like a Pro.

Diana (47m 14s):
Well, thanks for listening everyone, and we will talk to you next time. Bye-Bye

Nicole (47m 19s):
Bye. 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 DA on amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family Locket dot com slash services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket dot com slash newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.