RLP 376: Preparing for Onsite Research – Part 3

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 376: Preparing for Onsite Research – Part 3 Welcome to Research Like a Pro, a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder, a accredited genealogist professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at FamilyLocket dot com and the authors of Research Like a Pro, a Genealogist Guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion Volume Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research, and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (41s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (48s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (50s):
Hey, I’m doing well. I’ve been working on some class presentations that I’m getting ready and all kinds of things. What about you?

Diana (60s):
Well, I have been reading a new book out by Elizabeth Shown Mills on citations. You might have seen this, called Your Stripped Bare Guide to Citing and Using History Sources and it’s got a funny little cartoon picture of a man holding a land patent over himself and a graduation hat on and he’s obviously in the nude. So it’s cute and I read through it and I think it is like the perfect book for anyone who’s just getting started with citations, and even for those of us who have been doing them for a long time. I’ve got the third and fourth edition of Evidence Explained, but already I can tell this is one, if I just have a simple question, I can just turn to this and get the answer.

Diana (1m 44s):
So I’m really excited to have just a thin little book to recommend to everyone and to have on my own shelf. All of the templates that she created for the fourth edition are in this. So if you wanna just quickly find the template or if you want quickly to find the reasoning behind, you know, identifying the what of a citation, all those types of things, it’s just right here in this little book. And then of course you’ll probably want the full books too, if you wanna look at really specifics for citing more difficult or more specialized products that we have to use like a court case or, you know, something really specific which she covers in her other books.

Diana (2m 25s):
So anyway, I’ve been having fun reading through that and preparing to teach the part about source citations for our study group, which I have done that one for years and I always like to update it and I’ll be updating with a few things from this book.

Nicole (2m 41s):
That’ll be great. And it’s nice to have a way to learn the principles of citation without feeling like you need to read the entire book from Evidence Explained. So this is a great kind of beginner’s guide to getting a more of a handle on how citation works and the ins and outs of all the different elements and the punctuation and just kind of getting a feel for that.

Diana (3m 6s):
Absolutely. And it really is nice just to have a quick guide to look it up because we learn, we understand, but then sometimes we have to have a little bit of a review and this will be perfect for that.

Nicole (3m 22s):
Yeah.

Diana (3m 22s):
Well let’s do some announcements. Our Research, Like a Pro Webinar Series is coming up in October. This will be October 21st and our presenter will be Melanie Whitt. The title is, “Parents for Ellen Cecilia Scott: a 19th-Century Irish Immigrant DNA Case Study”. So Ellen Cecilia Scott is an orphaned first generation Irish American born in 1860. She left few traces of her kin or their Irish origins. Census records and newspaper retrospectives based on her late life interviews conflicted about her birthplace, Illinois or Iowa, her mother’s death when Ellen was 18 months old and when her father placed her with adoptive parents.

Diana (4m 9s):
Her father’s fate also remains unknown, though her death certificate named her Irish born parents as Patrick Scott and Margaret Cox, no US or Irish records have confirmed them. Autosomal DNA analysis revealed genetic networks and pedigree triangulation, distinguished maternal from paternal lines, leading to specific US and Irish localities and candidate parents. This case study features DA network graphs created in Gephi using Ancestry DNA match data. So I am excited to learn from Melanie. She is a wiz at DNA and research. She is a professional genealogist, she’s one of our team members and she holds a Master of Science with Distinction in Genealogical, Paleographic, and Heraldic Studies from the University of Strathclyde, and is a Qualified Genealogist with the UK’s Register of Qualified Genealogists.

Diana (5m 4s):
As a child of recent immigrants to the US, her work has a strong international focus in France, Sweden, Germany, and the British Isles alongside extensive research in the Great Lakes and Northwest region. She regularly uses DNA analysis including solving biological family identity cases and is a graduate and mentor of the Research Like a Pro with DNA study group. Outside of research Melanie enjoys family time, travel, dining out and pickleball. So we hope you will join us for that webinar. Our next study group will be DNA study group and that starts in February, 2026. And the peer group leader application is on our website.

Diana (5m 48s):
So we invite you to join us either as an attendee first time or second or third time or as a peer group leader. We are excited about the upcoming conference, which is all virtual. This is the Texas State Genealogy Conference. It’s November 7th and 8th and Nicole is presenting two lectures, one on text records and one on AI and genealogy. And I’m presenting two lectures, one on focused narratives through small bites of research and then one on female ancestry and cluster research and DNA when you have burned records.

Diana (6m 29s):
So we’re excited about that. And then as always, join our newsletter for coupons and the news, what we’re doing and our latest blog posts, podcasts, and other things associated with Research Like a Pro and FamilyLocket. Well we are going to return to the whole idea of Onsite Research. So in previous episodes we’ve talked all about what you need to do to set your foundation, things you need to prepare for, so creating your clear research objective, developing the timeline, conducting locality research, and creating that detailed research plan.

Diana (7m 9s):
And today we’re going to talk about the final and perhaps most important step that can make or break your research trip.

Nicole (7m 18s):
Alright, so the step is to call the facility. And I don’t know if this is the most important step, but it certainly is crucial because calling ahead can be when we learn if the facility will actually be open as we have maybe researched and found that their visiting hours are such and such, but sometimes there’s closures for different reasons, people go out for lunch. It’s good to just call and find out all the details that we need to know. And calling is just the best way I have found to get that information. So even when you’ve done online preparation, looking at the website, all that kind of thing, talking to a real person there at the facility can help us find all that critical information that we either overlooked didn’t understand or their website just didn’t provide

Diana (8m 9s):
Well and I think this is just how life goes. You know, the website might say that these are the hours, but then there’s a celebration in town and they’re gonna close down for the afternoon. You know, things like that. So you have had some experience lately in Love County, Oklahoma and Kentucky that really demonstrates why this step is crucial. So in Love County, Nicole discovered that while emails to the county clerk were not answered, calling the office directly got immediate responses and helpful information about the hours and procedures. And so, you know, that was a good example of why the phone is more effective than email.

Diana (8m 50s):
And you know, as someone working in an office, I can just imagine how many emails that they would get and then you probably get their attention quicker with a phone call. So that’s such a good lesson to learn.

Nicole (9m 8s):
So like we have said, one of the purposes of the phone call is to verify the hours closures and any special circumstances. So when we went with the National Genealogical Society Conference to the Kentucky Library and Archives, that research visit perfectly illustrates why you can’t rely on just information that you’re getting secondhand. Calling ahead would’ve helped me understand better what was going to happen when we got there on that Friday. And the Kentucky department for Library and Archives is normally closed on Fridays, but they had opened especially for our NGS conference group. So I think probably calling ahead would’ve been a way to understand that that special arrangement came with limitations.

Nicole (9m 52s):
The fact that there would be a tour, but not access to ordering any records from upstairs and no original records, it would just be only microfilm and databases on their computers, which included indexes you couldn’t get anywhere else. So it was good to do, but a simple phone call would’ve revealed that. So I could have saved myself some of the time I spent planning to examine original sources and trying to think of what to order and instead of focusing on what indexes I would need to search and that kind thing. So it could have helped me with the research plan quite a bit. I could have also planned a separate visit during their regular operating hours when their full services were available had I known.

Nicole (10m 39s):
But since my trip was over Memorial Day weekend from Thursday to Tuesday, the next time after our tour on Friday that I could order records would’ve been Tuesday and that was the day we were flying home. So it’s good to think about these things before you arrange your travel times and just be aware of closures and that kind of thing. So it just was, it just happened to be that, You know, they’re closed on Friday, Monday was a holiday. So Thursday and Tuesday being my travel days, it just really wasn’t a good day to actually go to the archives.

Diana (11m 13s):
Yeah, lesson learned, right? So part of this phone call should be, you know, are there any special circumstances and exactly what can we do while we’re there? So as you said Nicole, you know, if you’re booking flights or just trying to get into your itinerary, all the things you want to do, you want to know specifically how to use your time. And you know, if you’re traveling into an area you are doing research, but then you might also be picking some other neat things to see like maybe museums or other sites of interest, cemetery research, all sorts of different things.

Diana (11m 55s):
And so sometimes coordinating all these different places you want to go could be tricky. So it’s just really good to nail down the things that are hard and fast So that you can work around the things like a cemetery that generally you can go whenever you want to. So if you’d known about the limitations, as you said, you could have either come earlier or stayed an extra day and you know, that’s just part of learning how to do this onsite research.

Nicole (12m 22s):
Yes, exactly. It’s a learning process. Well another thing to ask about when you call the facility is to find out what the physical workspace is like there and any equipment needs. And the research that I did at the Love County courthouse and jail behind the courthouse taught me how important it is to ask these practical questions in your phone call. In the county clerk’s office, there were not any chairs, which was fine, I just, you know, I used this tables they had, they were like taller for standing up. And So that was okay, but also, you know, if you need to have sitting breaks you could bring your own little like portable stool or something.

Nicole (13m 9s):
And then in this Treasurer’s storage room, which was in the old jail, I was kneeling on the floor using a plastic bin as a table because there it was just a storage room and they were kind enough to let me go in there. And so I was very grateful. But also if it’s hard for you to kneel or you’re gonna need some other way of viewing the records, you just wanna think about that. And so just knowing what, what’s there and what’s available will help a lot. And the old jail had concrete floors and it was just, wasn’t like a, a library or archives room, it was a storage room. And so talking with the Treasurer’s office beforehand could have helped me understand these conditions and I could have brought like one of those gardening kneeling pads, or I could have worn closed toed shoes, and I did return the next day and I did wear the closed toed shoes that time.

Nicole (14m 4s):
So I learned from my first day what to wear on the second day.

Diana (14m 10s):
So the closed toed shoes was this because you were scraping up your feet ’cause you were kneeling down on concrete floor?

Nicole (14m 17s):
Just just because it was kind of dirty in there and it was like you had dusty dirty, there were cricket dead crickets on a lot of the volumes. It just felt like a place where I would wanna have my feet covered and yeah, I guess kneeling down, I’m trying to remember exactly why, but yeah, probably ’cause I was kneeling down, I was just probably more comfortable to have the shoes to keep my feet from touching the dusty, dirty floor.

Diana (14m 46s):
Yeah. Well it’s interesting because you just do not know unless you have called ahead and I think even if you call ahead, it’s hard to picture what it’ll be like unless you’ve seen pictures and talked to somebody who’s been there, right? So I know when I was at the Chambers County courthouse earlier this year, I had seen pictures and I knew that they had a ladder and that these volumes were up really high and that you had to have some upper body strength to pull these down. So I was aware of that, but I had only taken like one sweater, an off-white sweater and I thought it was going to be hot in Alabama in April.

Diana (15m 28s):
And then it turned out to be really cold because of a rainstorm that came through. And so I wore this long sleeve sweater, which happened to be white and I thought, oh, for a dusty room that’s not the best choice of clothing, but it’s what I had. So, you know, I think it’s really a good idea to just not wear your best clothes to research in these types of places because they’re, they’re often dirty and dusty and you know, I didn’t have bugs but definitely it was not like it was a pristine hotel room, that’s for sure.

Nicole (16m 2s):
That’s so true.

Diana (16m 3s):
Now it was way different when I went to the Alabama archives, which was pristine, it was like everything was perfectly set up and so clean and nice and new. So yeah, courthouses are a little bit different. Well and I think it’s interesting that you even thought about a ladder access ’cause you also were interested in the courthouse over at Los Animas County in Colorado and you had learned that the tax records were too high and they had a ladder, but it wouldn’t even, no one could reach those. So, you know, it’d be good to know there if you could bring in your own ladder I guess, or rent a ladder. I’d be curious about how they expect people to access the tax records.

Nicole (16m 45s):
Right? I know that one still is one I’m not sure how they would expect to get it down, but I had hired a researcher and she had gone there and she had used the ladder, but there were still some volumes that were just up too high that she couldn’t reach at all and neither could any of the staff there. So asking about, so I had called ahead to this county courthouse and asked them if they had certain volumes and I didn’t think to ask if they could be reached by anyone. So if I got lucky that the vol, you know, some of the volumes were accessible could be reached and that things were found in them because one of the years that I wanted to look at wasn’t.

Nicole (17m 31s):
And so if that had been like the only year or if all of them had been inaccessible, I would’ve been disappointed. And so that’s just another thing to think about asking, you know, so do I have to bring someone tall with me?

Diana (17m 46s):
Well you do have a very, very tall person in your household who maybe could those high textbooks that you’d have to enlist.

Nicole (17m 55s):
Exactly. My husband is a foot taller than me so he could have been really useful in that situation.

Diana (18m 1s):
Yeah. And long arms, I know when you visit our house, you know, it’s just amazing to me that where I have to get a stool or climb up on the cupboard, he just can reach up and get something down from my tall cupboard stuff.

Nicole (18m 14s):
That’s so true.

Diana (18m 14s):
How would it be to not be so short?

Nicole (18m 17s):
I guess the takeaway here is don’t be embarrassed to talk about basic logistics and the facility staff probably will appreciate researchers who come prepared with what they might need to get the records they want and then they don’t have to feel bad for not being able to reach them themselves.

Diana (18m 35s):
Good point.

Nicole (18m 35s):
And you know, if you know that something is just not accessible, no one can reach it, then you might just say, okay, I’m no one’s gonna be able to get this. I need to make a different plan for something else to look at. Now let’s have a word from our Sponsor. Ever wondered what life was really like for your ancestors? With Newspapers.com you can explore the world they lived in through their eyes, in their time. Search over a billion newspaper pages dating from 1690 to 2025 and uncover the stories that shaped your family’s past from birth and wedding announcements to obituaries and community news. These pages hold the milestones and everyday moments that connect you to your roots, but it’s more than names and dates, it’s about standing in their shoes.

Nicole (19m 16s):
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Diana (19m 46s):
Alright, now let’s talk about photography and documentation policies. So when you visited Love County, they had a restriction on photographing the index pages that caught you off guard partway through that first day and there was a sign there that said photographing indexes wasn’t allowed. But sometimes we just don’t notice those types of things when we’re so excited to look at the records.

Nicole (20m 11s):
I hadn’t really paid attention to that sign yet.

Diana (20m 14s):
But luckily you’re still able to get the actual deeds and so if you had asked about that it could have clarified that you can actually photograph the actual documents, just not your, the index pages because of privacy concerns about the modern property records. So I think our time is so limited at these types of onsite research areas that you just wanna be prepared and have alternate strategies in case you cannot do that. So if you were planning on just taking pictures and didn’t have a notebook, you’d be in trouble.

Nicole (20m 50s):
Yeah, you don’t wanna be in trouble. Well I took a picture of the sign so I could remember what it said later, so let me read it to you, but it basically was just saying that they don’t want people using lists of property people own for spamming them with like junk mail, I think.

Diana (21m 12s):
Oh that makes sense. Interesting. Well, and it probably came about because of a situation, you know, maybe they have had this come up and they had to make that policy.

Nicole (21m 22s):
Oh here’s what it is. So the sign says notice copy copying tracked indexes, and then it cites like one of the laws of the state, and it talks about the index shall not be copied or mechanically reproduced for the purpose of sale of the information.

Diana (21m 40s):
Okay.

Nicole (21m 40s):
So there you go.

Diana (21m 43s):
Good to know. Well regardless we have to think about that now we will always know to ask about taking notes and photographs and that’s just a very important part of our research. It is being able to record the information we’re looking at.

Nicole (21m 58s):
Yeah. And the staff member was really nice. They just told me that I couldn’t do it and the sign does say that you can be asked to leave the office if you’re caught photographing indexes. So I thought that was funny that they knew that I was just unaware rather than maliciously trying to sell right people’s information. So, so it is good to find that out and always ask about the photographing of the actual records too if they want you to pay for that or you know, you’re supposed to get photocopies. All these places probably have some kind of policy about it, whether it’s that they just allow you to take pictures of anything or there’s some things that they prefer that you get photocopied, who knows what it is, every place will be different.

Nicole (22m 45s):
And so it’s just good to find out what you can and can’t photograph and whether there are different policies for different types of records.

Diana (22m 52s):
Perfect. Well something else to learn about ahead of time is how the records are organized and how you access them. So the example of the Kentucky archives showed how calling ahead could have revealed their unique procedures and we learned too late that their circuit court records, which is the bulk of their holdings, requires using onsite digital indexes first and then submitting a request for the specific documents. And that can be a little tricky to figure out and can take some of your research time away just trying to understand the systems. So for an archive or a facility like this with complex retrieval systems, you could certainly call ahead and just ask about the process and then it can help you to prepare more targeted research questions for what you specifically want to do while you were there.

Nicole (23m 48s):
Yeah. And don’t hesitate to ask detailed questions about how records are organized and accessed. So questions like, how do I request specific documents and are there finding aids I should know about? Can save you hours of confusion during your visit if you can learn more about that before you get there.

Diana (24m 6s):
And you know, from my experience at the Alabama archives, sometimes it’s just really beneficial when you get there to have the archivist sit down with you and help you navigate their systems because they know their systems better than anyone else and often they’re not super easy to use for the public. So I would also say, is there a chance that I could schedule an archivist to meet with me tomorrow morning, you know, at 10:00 AM maybe you can request a consultation or something so that you’ve got somebody just ready there to help you in case you’re going to need some help. Because who knows, maybe they’re really busy and there’s not gonna be anybody there to help you.

Diana (24m 47s):
But if you know somebody will be there, then it will also help you to plan. Well both of these research trips really showed how calling ahead prevents the frustration of spending valuable time learning procedures that could have been understood in advance. So in Love county not knowing about, you know, how they had organized their township based index system cost a lot of time. And then in Kentucky the entire group visit was limited to orientation activities rather than actual research. So sometimes we come away feeling a little disappointed and we do the best we can, but really helps to call ahead.

Nicole (25m 30s):
Right. And in my call ahead to Love County, they had told me about the township range index system, but even so, knowing that and preparing and kind of understanding where the property was that I was looking for, it still was just challenging to figure it all out. And so it did just take time just, it was just different than I had ever seen before for deed indexes to be by section and township and range. And so I just spent some time like slowly learning how it was organized and I wouldn’t say that it cost me a lot of time, but if I would go again I’d be faster, you know, so I think it’s just part of the learning curve for visiting a courthouse that has a different type of index than the other digitized index I’ve seen online for other places.

Diana (26m 25s):
Were you able to ask them questions or did you have someone kind of orient you to the records?

Nicole (26m 30s):
No, that would’ve been helpful. They were all pretty busy and when I asked questions sometimes they didn’t know the answer. And do that was tricky too, ’cause there were like four or five people working in there and sometimes they would walk through the room, you know, they were going back to get something or whatever. And so I sometimes would say like, oh, I can’t even remember what one of my questions was, but I, one time I asked a question and one time they didn’t know the answer. And I think I also asked like where the mortgage books and someone said they were not available, they were being like rebound or something. So there were, you know, one set of volumes that I couldn’t access, but it was a little bit less like an archive where there’s people who are there helping you research than you know, and more like a an actual place where they have a job to do and they have things going on that and they’re just kind of tolerating you as a researcher, you know?

Nicole (27m 27s):
Yeah.

Diana (27m 27s):
You’re their guest and you’re happy that they’re letting you in at all, so.

Nicole (27m 32s):
Right. Yeah, So it was good and I was happy to have all the time I needed there to look at the index volumes and just absorb everything and under try to figure it out. But yeah, it was just different and even knowing beforehand what it would be like didn’t mean that it was fast and easy to do when I got there.

Diana (27m 53s):
Well, and this just happens with any onsite research facility. I even think about the FamilySearch Library and how sometimes I needed to use microfiche and just understanding their system for how you get the microfiche out and how they have that organized and how you put it in the microfiche reader and then how that is organized. There is just a learning curve for all this type of research. So, you know, you kind think you have to give yourself a little grace and realize I’m gonna do the best I can and that’s all we can do.

Nicole (28m 30s):
Yeah. And it’s, you know, one thing that really helped me was having my research notes and knowing which websites to use. I used the Randy Majors website for kind of figuring out where things were located in which section and which, you know, township and range and all that. And kind of correlating that with where towns were from the 1900 census and that kind of thing. So that’s ultimately what was the most helpful was just trying to correlate all of that with maps. And that’s ultimately how I found the deeds was really looking at every detail that I had about where they lived and and kind of searching in those sections.

Diana (29m 12s):
And you did that before you got there, right?

Nicole (29m 14s):
Yeah, I had done some before and I, the exact sections that I had planned to look in did have some of the deeds and so, and then some of the sections I had planned to look in didn’t have any deeds. And then after that I just kind of kept expanding out in the areas around each of those sections. And that’s where I found even more. And one that was tricky is that the Marietta City or, so there were like four, three townships divisions, civil divisions, within the county, Bernie, Hickory and Washington Townships. Then within Washington Township was the city of Marietta. And so You know how like towns will have lots, town lots,

Diana (29m 58s):
Right?

Nicole (29m 58s):
So they had like a separate index book, several volumes for Marietta outside of the, outside of the township and range system, just for like the town of Marietta because it wasn’t by section, Township, and range, it was by town lots and blocks. So that was another thing that I didn’t know that, you know, I didn’t know to ask about that and it just wasn’t obvious. So that one, I had to go back finally by the third time I found it. So that was tricky and I think I did ask that question. And finally somebody told me that the Marietta books were separate.

Diana (30m 41s):
Yeah.

Nicole (30m 42s):
And so I found them eventually

Diana (30m 47s):
Tricky. Oh, that’s great. Well, it’s been fun to talk about your different experiences both in Kentucky and at the Love Courthouse. And I think that we have really emphasized here that it’s really crucial to call ahead of time and to realize that, You know, sometimes you just have to show up and figure it out and you do your best to prepare, but then that’s where you are. So any final tips or anything from our listeners as we wrap up this episode?

Nicole (31m 21s):
I would just say that if you can take pictures of the indexes and that is allowed, that you should do that, because there were some deeds that I missed and then I was looking at some of the pictures I took of the deed index before I found out it was against the rules and realized that I had not photographed two of the deeds I needed. So that was really helpful to just be able to follow up later when I was home and say, oh, can you get this picture of the deed for me? So, and just being able to go back like if you can at all plan for two days So that you have a chance to do one visit, then go back to your hotel and process and like think about things and then go back.

Nicole (32m 6s):
Because the second time I went back to the deed office and to the tax storage room, I found almost as many things as I found the first day, sometimes more. And so if you can plan another day, then that is really, really good. Good and useful.

Diana (32m 25s):
Right, right. Good advice. Good advice. Well, thanks for listening everyone. We hope that this episode and this entire three-part series on preparation for that onsite research will help you make your next research trip more productive and successful. So it really makes the difference between a frustrating experience and a breakthrough in your research. So we hope you’ve gotten some good tips and we wish you all the best. So thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.

Nicole (32m 55s):
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 DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.