RLP 85: Adding Context to Genealogical Writing

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro Episode 85: Adding Context to Genealogical Writing. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone. And welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer, co-host of the Research Like a Pro podcast, and I’m here with a credited genealogist, Diana Elder. Hi, Diana, how are you?

Diana (57s):
I’m doing really well. How are you doing Nicole?

Nicole (1m 1s):
Doing great. How’s your week going?

Diana (1m 3s):
It’s going well, I just finished up a really intense client project and whenever I finished those, I just want to do the Genealogy happy dance because I’ve come to a good conclusion and it’s all written up. That’s always really exciting. And then I’m ready to jump into the next one. So it’s been kind of a fun week.

Nicole (1m 23s):
That’s great that you came to a good conclusion on, on your last report. That’s fun cause we don’t always do that, right? Sometimes we just have a needs more research conclusion.

Diana (1m 33s):
Well, this was, I think about the sixth project I have done on this specific ancestor. And so I actually went back to my very first project and tied it all together from that. So it was really great because I had all the research done and I had it written up and I could just piggyback right on that. And it really helped a lot. And this was one of those that I use both DNA and traditional research kind of going back and forth. And so it was really exciting to finally pull things together and take this ancestor back to Virginia and to whole family with a lot of generations previous.

Diana (2m 14s):
And it was an ancestor who’d moved out to Tennessee and gotten lost, you know, so many of those Tennessee people so hard to connect them back to their ties. This pretty much proved that. And so I think it was really a fun project to finish up.

Nicole (2m 30s):
That’s great. I love that story. Yeah with all the record loss in Tennessee and the early 1800s, it is so hard to find those clues leading back to the generation before. Okay. Let’s do our listeners’ spotlight our review. The listener today is Emily DB and her title is, “so helpful. The best discussions. Every time I listened to an episode, I learned something concrete and useful. Every episode is motivating and helps me feel excited about the projects in my life.” So glad to hear it, Emily, and thank you very much for sharing that with us so that we can give you a shout out.

Nicole (3m 11s):
So what are we going to talk about today, Diana?

Diana (3m 13s):
Well, today our topic is taken from actually a question a listener sent in, and it was how do I go about adding more context to my genealogical writing? And I thought this was a really great question because we do talk a lot about writing up our research and adding various elements to it, to help it make sense. So we’re going to dive into that a little bit deeper today. So first of all, let’s just think about the different kinds of genealogical writing we might like to do. Well, I obviously write a lot of reports because I am doing specific projects for clients or for myself and I write a report.

Diana (3m 56s):
But, the culmination of those reports could be a proof argument that you might want to have published or post online on your website or FamilySearch or wherever you like to put your research. And maybe you are doing a history for your family and you’re writing up histories for each generation that you want to publish in a book or that you want to give to all of your children or grandchildren. So there’s lots of different forms our genealogical writing could take. And I think that this episode would be incomplete if we didn’t talk about why we write, those are the types of writing we could do, but why do we really have to write anything down?

Diana (4m 37s):
Isn’t it just okay to have a database or have an Ancestry tree? Can’t we just put everything there in the details? Well, here’s the thing. You may have all the answers to a genealogical problem, kind of sitting out there in the form of indirect or negative evidence or even the context. And it’s when you write about it, that it brings it all together. So it helps us form connections between all those different bits of evidence in the records. And here’s the thing. If you have to write about a record, you can’t just start writing without understanding that record.

Diana (5m 20s):
So writing it down is going to make you dig in a little deeper, and you’re going to do a little bit more research about it perhaps, and that’s going to increase your understanding and it’s going to help you make more connections. Now, if you are working on a really tough problem like that project I was talking about earlier, if you write it down, you won’t forget it. Well, I guarantee you will forget it, but you can go back and read your report and then remember your conclusions, especially if you’ve done several other projects or worked on different ancestors in between. Sometimes we go back to past research. We just don’t quite remember how we got them from point A to point B.

Diana (6m 5s):
So having it written down is so very helpful then, like I sort of mentioned, it helps us resolve conflicting evidence. I can guarantee you that we are not going to have everything lined up perfectly. When we really analyze our records, there’s always going to be that one record that doesn’t fit in. It gives a completely different birth date or death date, and we’re going to have to resolve that our writing helps us do that. And then finally, what we’re going to talk about today, when we add context to our writing, it helps us bring the whole research project into better focus and it can actually help us to make better conclusions just by learning the context.

Nicole (6m 51s):
Yeah, that makes sense that we would make a more informed conclusion about the records if we understand why they were created and what purpose they’re serving. So let’s talk next about how to discover this valuable context that we’re talking about. So when you’re doing the research process, it’s important to include records in your research plan that will teach you about the context of the time and place as you follow your research plan, you can put all of the things that you’re finding about the context into your research log and create citations for them as you go. And this is really important that you don’t just remember what you learned about the context, but actually have a citation to where you learned it from, because you’ll want to cite your sources in your report, and that can give your reader, you know, if it’s a client or a family member, a chance to go and learn more about the context from those records so that they can understand it better too.

Nicole (7m 50s):
So there’s different sub contexts that we can talk about in time period, location, we’ll also talk later about community and family dynamics. So for the time period, we can consider cultural things that have changed over time. Like what kind of things did they eat? And of course this will also depend on the location. And what kind of clothes do they wear? What was a typical home like? We can study books and articles about these specific places and look for time period clues like this. And it’s important to look for clues for your ancestor in every possible source. So not just culture, but history.

Nicole (8m 30s):
What were the major events taking place in the community, state, country or world? You can think about how these would have affected the family. And sometimes it’s good to include these major events in our timeline and have them there to remind us that certain wars or conflicts were taking place or the Great Depression, the large things that affected all families in a certain place. Sometimes these wars and economic depressions were the impetus for migration. So having that in our timeline and in our research plan can help us to learn about possible moving around of the family. Also religious oppression or people’s desire to be with others of the same religion can also have an impact on family movements and migration.

Nicole (9m 18s):
So considering that can be helpful. Lastly, consider what laws were passed by the government that would have affected the family. So this goes into the historical context section. Often those laws will have caused certain records to be created that our ancestors could be named on. And of course, our favorite sources for looking at those historical state books of laws are Google books, Internet Archive and Hathi Trust. These websites have digitized those old books, and you can often find a law book for your state from the year before or the year after the plaintiffs or the event that they were recorded on.

Nicole (9m 58s):
So like if you find a tax record from 1803, you could probably find a tax law in the law book of 1802.

Diana (10m 5s):
That’s a really great point that we can actually go see the real laws because all of those books are online. They’re available to us. And that’s one of the things we teach about our locality guide, that if you find a really good source for the laws of your area, to make sure you put your link in there. So I just wanted to comment that when I did my colonial Virginia class with Barbara Vines Little at SLIG in January, I learned a lot about colonial Virginia and the history. We really went in depth on a lot of different things because it made such a difference in researching the people. And one of the things that had not really occurred to me was that during the French and Indian wars, it was so bad in Virginia, that a lot of the people just went to either north or South Carolina, where there was not so much fighting.

Diana (10m 55s):
And then when things settled down in Virginia, they went back up to Virginia. So the French and Indian Wars were mid 1700s. And if you have an ancestor that disappears out of there, shows up in the Carolinas, that could be the reason. So really understanding what was happening in the area can have a lot more impact on our research than we might think it can really help us determined why someone did what they did.

Nicole (11m 22s):
That’s important. And I think it’s also even more important than just knowing why someone did what they did. It helps us to explain why there could be a change in the records, right? So if we are surprised to see that our ancestor moved so far away, we might need to find evidence that shows it probably is still the same person because of this movement or this or this migration that happened. So it really can add to our body of evidence when we have this historical context and information.

Diana (11m 53s):
That’s exactly right. And this is usually our brick wall ancestors because they’ve left one place and then they show up in another place and we have to figure out how to connect them

Nicole (12m 3s):
Before we go to the next section, let’s talk for one second about religion, because often in religious records, church records, things can mean different things based on the type of church and what their method of doing things for. So for example, when were people generally baptized in a certain church, some churches only did teen and adult baptisms like the Baptist church, whereas the Episcopal or Anglican church did more infant baptisms. So if you’re looking at a register of baptisms and it doesn’t say a person’s birth date, only their baptism, knowing that background have how that religion recorded, their baptisms will give more meaning to it.

Nicole (12m 47s):
So learning those common religious practices of the community and all those background details can give you a lot better understanding of the records.

Diana (12m 58s):
I think church records are a set of records that we often don’t use quite as much because they are maybe not online. And we often have to go to a repository or we have to go to the headquarters of the church to find those more and more of those are becoming accessible, but church records can be the entire key to research problems. So if you’ve kind of come to the end of your rope and you haven’t yet delved into those, those might be useful. We have to remember that religion was very important to our ancestors. This is the whole reason that many of them actually moved to the New World. Finding the church records could really open up a new avenue of research.

Diana (13m 41s):
So let’s go on and talk about locality. And this is such an important step that we have a whole step of the Research Like a Pro process, where we discover more about locality. And so this is going to give us a lot more context. As we write up our reports or our histories, you’re going to want to make sure that you’ve actually discovered some really good sources for your specific locality. And those would include historical maps, Gazetteers, migration, trails, and patterns, the jurisdictions that you already talked about, Nicole, and boundary changes. So I want to make sure we really understand our locality, but then once we had that understanding, that’s going to help us understand how the geography of an area might have impacted our ancestors.

Diana (14m 31s):
Some things to think about are, how did they travel? Were there railroads nearby? What were the principal roads? I know sometimes I skip this step and I don’t think to go look at a historical railroad map. Sometimes we think that our ancestors always just went by wagon and they would never have taken the railroad. And then we discover that right there in 1850 was a railroad and they certainly could have taken that. So I think it’s really important that we consider all sorts of different possibilities. And when we’re writing our reports, we may not even know for sure, but we could certainly put in something like the ancestor could have taken this railroad.

Diana (15m 15s):
It was very common for people to travel from this city, to this city, taking this path. So we just put it into something likely because it does add a little bit more flavor to our writing. It adds a little bit more understanding to what things could have been, even though we don’t know for sure. Now what about the weather? Weather is a really interesting thing to consider. You can study the weather patterns of the area, not only historical, but just what it’s like. Now I live in Utah. It’s hot in the summer. It’s cold in the winter. It is dry all the time. And you know, a lot of places have not changed and we can consider what it was like for our ancestors to live in a certain area.

Diana (16m 3s):
Now, one thing I learned a lot about at my Advanced Southern Research class by Mark Lowe a year ago was that our Southern ancestors often migrated just to another Southern state because they were used to the type of crops you could grow in that weather pattern. So you probably wouldn’t see somebody from South Carolina moving to Minnesota, they moved to Arkansas or Alabama or Texas because they could grow the same kind of crops. And another example of that is that we have a really large portion of Scandinavian immigrants that went up into Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, that area.

Diana (16m 46s):
Why do you think they were going there? Well, I think that it was a similar weather pattern to what they were used to. Something else to think about is if there was some monumental historical weather event that affected movement. And of course the one that I think about with my ancestors was the dust bowl that hit the Great Plains, you know, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado in the 1930s. And all of my ancestors were right there in Oklahoma. And my dad wrote about the dust bowl and how everyone had to put handkerchiefs over their faces when a big storm would hit. Well, this greatly affected my ancestors because they all moved to California to escape that. And that’s not so long ago, but I have a story from the 1780s that helps to explain my Royston ancestors, why they left Gloucester county, Virginia, and ended up in Georgia.

Diana (17m 38s):
I came across the writings of a woman who explained that a big hurricane came through in the 1780s and completely inundated the land, there was so much saltwater in the land that it couldn’t be farmed. So when I read that, I thought, okay, that is probably why they picked up and moved south. You know, I can’t say for sure that that is exactly what happened, but I can include that in my writing and say, this could have affected the ancestors and this could provide a possible reason for their migration. So just learning about these things can really help us to explain why someone shows up in a different place, Just like you were talking about Nicole.

Nicole (18m 22s):
Yeah, that’s really good. I think probably a lot of people are wondering, well, how do I find out about those historical weather events? I know that there is a website that has some major weather events like that listed in history. So I’ll see if I can find that and put it in the show notes. But mostly I think what we would say is go back to those county histories and look at those. And a lot of the time you can find those by just going to the FamilySearch Catalog and typing in the county or the state that you’re looking at under the subject heading of history, you’ll often find several different items. And then of course, one of our favorite subjects to talk about as PERSI, the Periodical Source Index.

Nicole (19m 4s):
And we would definitely recommend looking in there and just typing in the place and maybe even searching for the keyword weather. I think what I would do is just put in the county and maybe the subject of history within PERSI, the Periodical Source Index and see what articles you can find on the history of a county. Often you’ll find really specific ones that will tell you what happened in the 1780s like that hurricane.

Diana (19m 33s):
I think another good source would be historical newspapers also because they maybe would record things such as the weather. If it was really a monumental thing, then that’s a possibility also, you know,

Nicole (19m 45s):
Of course, newspapers, that is such a great idea. But if there is a newspaper at the time in place where our ancestors were, we should definitely be checking that because we just never know what kind of gems will be in there until we get it and look through it. I love to order microfilm newspapers from my library here through interlibrary loan and just go scroll through the newspaper. And I took a lot of screenshots of this one newspaper, the Pendleton Messenger, and I was looking through them the other day. And I found a record of marriage for the original Siamese twins, Chang and Ang. Have you heard of them?

Diana (20m 24s):
I think maybe I have long ago, but that was fun.

Nicole (20m 27s):
Just, I hadn’t really learned the history of the name, Siamese twins. So when I saw this marriage entry and went and looked up on Wikipedia their names, I found that they were connected together, but they both got married to different women and they spent half of their time with one wife at her house. And then half of their time with the other wife at her house.

Diana (20m 48s):
That is really interesting.

Nicole (20m 50s):
That’s a little bit of a sidetrack there, but I just thought it was so interesting. I mean, you just never know what you’ll find in those old newspapers. So it’s fun to check. One other note that I had about why southerners stayed Southern, of course, they definitely wanted to stay with the crops that they were familiar with that would survive in their climate, but a lot of the time in the antebellum period, before the Civil War, they did not want to migrate to Northern states where their slaves would be set free by the laws there. So a lot of it had to do with political things and wanting to be with people who had the same beliefs about slavery.

Diana (21m 29s):
That’s an interesting thought. We sometimes can see what political parties our ancestors were part of, there are voting registers and I’ve seen some where they had to actually mark which political party they belong to. So that might be fun. Also, if you happen into something like that, that you could study the politics of the area, our ancestors were every bit as much involved in politics and things were just as heated back then as they are. Now, that could be a really interesting study as well.

Nicole (21m 59s):
Yes. One of the cases I’m working on in our family’s history right now is trying to figure out if our family came from this group of Loyalists during the American Revolution. Right now the DNA clues are leading me back to this guy who was a Loyalist and led a British attack in the early part of the American Revolution and then was exiled. And he left and ran away to Florida and Cuba for awhile. And then he shows up again in a petition to the Crown for basically kind of like a pension type of thing, because he lost a lot of his property during the war.

Nicole (22m 41s):
So yes, we definitely need to consider that our ancestors probably chose one side or the other and consider the implications for that. Because at that time period in North and South Carolina, which is where this family lived, a lot of the time, people would not intermarry with people on the opposite side. So you can use that as evidence to say, look, these two families were Loyalists. They all lived in this same area. So it’s more evidence that they were connected.

Diana (23m 7s):
Wow, that’s a really great point. I think that we always kind of tend to think that our Revolutionary War ancestors were Patriots. And so of course, we’re going to have some Loyalists back there, right? So good to open our eyes, all sorts of different possibilities with our ancestors. You never know what their political leanings might’ve been.

Nicole (23m 29s):
And I’m kind of grateful this ancestor was a Loyalist because it means he created a lot more records.

Diana (23m 35s):
That is true. Interesting.

Nicole (23m 38s):
All right. Well, that was a lot of good context about location, the geography, the weather, and then jumping back to politics, which probably falls under the time period and the culture and history, but they’re all interwoven, aren’t they? Let’s talk next about community context. Some sources that we might find our relatives in that could give clues to this would be city directories, census records, newspapers, county histories, church histories, church records, and business records. So all of these can tell us about our ancestors community and knowing this context can help us identify an ancestor who has the same name as other people and help us understand more about them and their lives.

Nicole (24m 27s):
So let’s talk about ethnic makeup. You can find out more about an ancestor’s ethnicity by considering that it could be mentioned in a specific ethnic newspaper. You can also just understand, like, if you already know what ethnicity they are, you can look in these ethnic newspapers to understand what life was like for them. Often our newly immigrated ancestors will we living in a community that’s kind of made up of a lot of people from their same home country and they will have a newspaper in their language, or just have a newspaper with the news specific to their culture and ethnicity. You can also study the birth locations in the census to see if your ancestor was similar to others in the community or different.

Nicole (25m 14s):
And often I’ll see in a Southern state census that they were all born where they’re living now. And it’s really interesting to see in other counties that are further west, that some people were born there, but most they’re migrants, they’ve just moved there from another state. So you can see that all of these people are gathering in this new frontier because of the opportunity for land. And maybe they aren’t like a lot of the other people around them. It’s kind of a mixing pot type of thing. So you can learn a lot about the community just by looking at all the birth locations listed in the census. You can also look at the occupation of your ancestor and the occupations of the people in the community to get an idea of what work people were doing.

Nicole (26m 1s):
Maybe your ancestor was the norm or his occupation was unusual. Once you know their occupation, you can go learn more about it. Maybe he was a farmer and you can look at an agricultural schedule. It’s pretty interesting to see which kind of crops a person and all their neighbors were growing. It gives you insight into what was possible to grow and what made money, what was useful to them. So to really understand the primary occupations for a region, and you don’t have to just look at the census, you can, or the city directories, you can go to a published source, like a county history that could describe the land and the primary occupations and kind of why the people moved there, if it was a mining town, a logging community.

Nicole (26m 45s):
Often those will be detailed in the county histories.

Diana (26m 48s):
Right. And I think that community is so important in adding context to our writing because our ancestors didn’t just live in this little bubble, they were part of a living, breathing community. And so if you have an ancestor that is sort of elusive, like you don’t have very much about them and you really want to write a history or you want to flush out their lives, expanding to the community can help to give you more, to put on more flesh, to put on the bones of that story. So community and context can also help you figure out a complicated research problem. And one example of this is when I did a project on an individual named Berger Solberg, and he had shown up in Worcester, Massachusetts in the 1930 census and the client could not find him anywhere else.

Diana (27m 40s):
And so I did a whole research project on Berger, and I wanted to learn about why a Swedish man had come to that specific location. What was the community like in Worcester, Massachusetts? So interestingly enough, I went to PERSI, the Periodical Source Index, and I found that there were a few articles specifically about Swedes in Worcester, Massachusetts, it was in the Family History Library, so I took a trip up and looked at all those records, all those journal articles. And I learned that Worcester, Massachusetts was a huge place for the Swedes to join because they were having a depression in Sweden.

Diana (28m 20s):
This was the 1920s after World War I and they were all the skilled machinists who were looking for work. And so they would just come across the ocean for a period of time. Many of them just came for two or three years, worked, made money, went back to Sweden. This helped me to really understand why Berger Solberg would have come across. And he actually came across the ocean, travelled back and forth several different times. And the upshot of that was I discovered it wasn’t just one Berger. There were actually two different men, two different identities that I had to sort out. And so it was really helpful to get a whole view of that community and to learn about this occupation that was bringing these men over to Massachusetts.

Diana (29m 8s):
So that was really an interesting project. And it was interesting to put the context into the report because that made it so much more meaningful and it really did help prove my conclusions.

Nicole (29m 19s):
So where did you find his occupation listed?

Diana (29m 24s):
That was in the ship manifests. So when they were coming into the country, they had to list their occupation and where they were going, where they were from. Those were great lists of the 1920s. And then also that 1930 census of course would have his occupation, but mainly it was from all those ship manifests. And like I said, he came over two or three different times and always listed machinist or something similar, there was another term also that he used as his occupation.

Nicole (29m 56s):
That’s cool. This topic of occupations is really fascinating to me. I know there are some areas where researching requires that, you know, the occupation of the person to identify them like in England, I think, and maybe Ireland, because they didn’t have a lot of name variety, but you can really tell the difference between a person by looking at their occupation.

Diana (30m 18s):
I also think that we can learn a lot about a family or a person by their occupation because they were working at this whatever job it was for sometimes 10 or 12 hours a day. So just understanding more about what life might’ve been like for them, that can also add a lot of interesting information to our histories that we’re writing. And maybe not so much in a research report with a research report, like you said, an occupation could really differentiate between men have the same name, but if we are writing a history for our family, just trying to understand our ancestors’ lives, then really delving into their occupation would be important because that’s a huge part of who they were.

Nicole (30m 59s):
So how would you go find information about an occupation? What would you, what sources would you look in?

Diana (31m 6s):
You know, I would use those county histories and I would also see if there were some books written about a particular occupation. You know, there are historians who have gone into a period of time and just written an entire treatise on something in a community, you know, look for something like that, not even family history related, but maybe more on the history side of things and business directories, business directories sometimes have all sorts of interesting things. They can have ads discussing why you should come to the certain shop and what’s offered there. It could also give you an idea of how many shoemakers were in the town.

Diana (31m 49s):
Maybe you found out your ancestor was a shoemaker in a little town in England and you think, oh, that’s cool. He was a Shoemaker for the entire little village. And then you look in the business directory and there were a hundred other shoemakers. And then you discover that that was like a really principal industry for the area. So just researching a little bit more and some of those basic records, and again, newspapers like we talked about could maybe have some additional things. So, you know, consider all sorts of different things in the research planning stage, you can just kind of do a brain dump of all these different ideas and you can see what’s available and then make your research plan and then go see what you can find

Nicole (32m 28s):
That reminds me of JSTOR I found an article that was not indexed in PERSI, but I had found it in the FamilySearch catalog. And I was kind of searching online to see if I could find a digitized version and it was actually in JSTOR, which is usually not available for free, except for, with really old articles, because it’s like a place where current day articles are published. And so you have to log in with your institution if you are associated with one like a university. But if you’re not, you’re just someone like us, who’s just accessing it for historical information, you can get a free account and you can look at older articles that are kind of in the public domain.

Nicole (33m 8s):
Now, have you ever used JSTOR mom?

Diana (33m 12s):
I have not used it, but I just was looking at the Family History Library and that is actually there. That’s one of their offerings as a website. So if you’re planning a visit to the Family History Library, you can get on JSTOR there. I’ve heard a lot about it, but I have not delved into it. And I think that would be really useful. That’s where you’re going to get a lot of those articles that are written, not by genealogists, but by historians, that could be very helpful.

Nicole (33m 40s):
Yeah. I used it more in college when I was studying history. It’s just a place to access academic journal articles and books and primary sources. And it covers 75 different disciplines. So it’s not just for history. So if you’re wanting something beyond what’s available in PERSI, which focuses on family and local history, maybe you want more of event, a general article about a certain type of occupation. This is a good place to look, and you might be able to get it at your local library or your local Family History

Diana (34m 13s):
Center. Also it’s available at all the different universities. So you could research or in your area, you could go to access it, but again, make it part of your research plan, you know, have something really specific that you want to look for and have it be part of your plan and then make sure that you’re keeping track of what you’ve searched. So you don’t repeat that search with all of these searches for things about context. So we want to make sure we get the information, get our citation, get a link to it in our research logs so that we don’t repeat and spin our wheels.

Nicole (34m 47s):
And I think we’ve all done that before where we looked at an article and we haven’t been really sure what to do with it. So it’s a good time to just save that link in your research log so that if you need to come back to it, when you’re writing your report, you’ll have it ready to go. I was doing a research project where I had looked at a lot of articles to learn about the context, but I hadn’t saved them all. So when I was trying to write the report, I wanted to cite where I learned that, but I couldn’t remember where I had learned it. So it was frustrating and a good learning experience to always keep track of all the different articles that we’re reading to learn about the history and the context.

Diana (35m 23s):
Right. Well, let’s talk a little bit about the economics of the area and I have kind of a fun example for this. You want to figure out how much land or property your ancestor had if they were farming and of course the census does show that and it only shows what they reported so you’re going to get what they said, but it’s always interesting to compare your ancestor with the neighbors. Did everyone else have a thousand acres or was your ancestor the only one or did everyone else have 50 acres? You know, do a comparison. I will often go through the entire community just to get a feel for what the economics of the area was like, how my ancestor compared.

Diana (36m 4s):
Now, if you have got access to some of the church records, in particular the Virginia Anglican vestry records, you can get some really interesting things. So a project that I recently did, I went through all of, they called it the vestry. It was the church records for this particular surname. And I just abstracted every single mention of the family in the records. And what I discovered was in the 1760s, 1770s and early 1780s, this family must have been relatively wealthy because they were helping other people they were taking in and providing for these children.

Diana (36m 44s):
They were giving money to the widow, you know, all these different things that something monumental happened in 1782, where the father died. So for a few more years, you see the widow and his children being okay. Then about 1790, they are now the recipients of all of this aid. And so that was so interesting. You know, this is a common thing. This is an economic downturn for this family when the father died. So that actually helped me to make a lot of conclusions about this family, genealogically, and with family relationships. But the context of it was really important in pulling it all together.

Nicole (37m 28s):
That kind of goes into our next topic, which is exploring the family dynamics, just considering that maybe we have blended families because our ancestor remarried after a spouse’s death. And sometimes they remarried multiple times. And then also looking into the extended family. For context, often we will see aging parents in the household or adult siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins, et cetera, and exploring these relationships can help us understand why this situation occurred. And an example of this is a family that I found on the census, Margaret Welch had married DH Harris.

Nicole (38m 8s):
And I knew that I was pretty sure that Margaret was the daughter of George and Lucinda Welch, but I only had indirect evidence. But one of those pieces of indirect evidence was that in their 1850 household Harris and Margaret had a, another adult living with them named John Welch. So it didn’t say that he was the brother-in-law, but I could deduce that he probably was because the families lived in close proximity together. So Margaret and John’s parents lived just a couple of households away. The other thing that was interesting is that Margaret’s husband DH Harris, his occupation was boot maker, and then they had this adult man, John Welch, living with them who was like 21 and his occupation was Shoemaker.

Nicole (38m 57s):
So I figured that he was learning the trade from his brother-in-law and living with him. So that’s kind of something that you could learn about when you see these adult people living in households, where they’re not maybe expected to be an understand why this could have occurred.

Diana (39m 11s):
That’s a really great example. And I think that in our day and age, we don’t see as many extended family members living with families as we did back in the day because of economic necessity, you know, they didn’t have anywhere else to go. They had to come in and live with a family if they were an aging parent or if they were an orphan child. So anytime we have an unusual person in the household, we’ve got to explore who they are and try to figure it out. So we have talked about so many fun, different types of contexts we could explore and research. So to wrap this episode up, let’s just talk about how we add that to our writing.

Diana (39m 55s):
So we have done our research. We’ve discovered some really neat things about the context, the weather migration, family dynamics, so many different things that we’ve talked about. So where do we put that in the report? You could start off with your report in your background information, setting the stage for your findings. You know, was there something that was just really key to this entire research report or history? You could start with that. And then maybe you want to just have things scattered throughout the report. For instance, if you’re discussing a marriage record, you could then talk more about the laws of the time and the customs of the time.

Diana (40m 36s):
And if there was a religion identified in the marriage records, you could talk more about that. So you can really include this context throughout the report, wherever it will shed light on the actual record and the conclusions that you’re coming to. So the important thing as you’re writing is that you just start writing a lot of times, we get hung up with the perfect order and you can make an outline that can work well, but sometimes you just need to start writing. And we live in a day where we can take an entire paragraph, cut it, and copy it or paste it, put it in a different place in our writing. And so don’t get too hung up about having it be perfect.

Diana (41m 19s):
Just get started, move things around, edit as you go. But as soon as you start writing, that will be easier.

Nicole (41m 25s):
You know, I think as we write, we start to come up with questions that lead us to seek out more context because we write down, they moved and then we think, why did they move? So I think it’s okay to add some of those things you want to research to your future research suggestions and to not worry about looking up everything right then, because when you’re doing multiple reports, it is an iterative process. And so maybe in the first phase you found some questions that you’d like to research in the next phase that include more contextual background type of sources.

Diana (41m 60s):
That’s a great point. We don’t want to make our reports be so long that we never get them finished because we have so many questions that we want to answer before we finish the report. So just putting it in future research is perfect.

Nicole (42m 12s):
Well, that was a fun episode. I hope you guys all enjoyed talking about context and how to add it to your genealogical writing.

Diana (42m 20s):
Yeah. I am loved going through all these different things and it makes me excited for my next research project because I want to use a lot of these concepts. So everyone have fun and go do some research today. Find some context for what you’re working on.

Nicole (42m 35s):
All right, everybody have a great week and we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye bye.

Diana (42m 41s):
Bye bye.

Nicole (42m 41s):
Thank you for listening to Research Like a Pro with Diana Elder, accredited genealogy professional and Nicole Dyer. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your own genealogy research. If you like what you heard, please leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or visit our website, FamilyLocket.com to contact us. You can find our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist’s Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.