RLP 86: Mining Records for Research Opportunities – Certification Preparation

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 86: Mining Records For Research Opportunities. 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 (46s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone. And welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer, co-host of the podcast, and I’m here with my mother accredited genealogist, Diana Elder. Hi, Diana, how are you?

Diana (58s):
I am doing well. Nicole, what are you working on this week?

Nicole (1m 2s):
I have been working on my case study preparation. I’m not writing it yet because I haven’t finished all the research. So I’m doing an iteration of the research project and putting together the locality guide right now. And I found that Pickens county, Alabama, all the records burned before 1876. So I’m trying to learn what might still be available and look for record substitutes.

Diana (1m 30s):
Oh, that sounds like fun. I think it’s so exciting when we discover something else that we can use. So many times when we have a burned county, we just think, okay, I’m going to give up, but there are lots more things we can do. So I’m excited to see what you figure out and we’ll see. Let’s do our listener spotlight. This is from vineyard woman and the title of the review is “learn something new with each podcast.” The review says, “every episode gives me a new thought process, tip resource or idea. After listening to an episode with Alice Childs, where she mentioned making quick trees, I decided I would try that with a challenging ancestor. My first thought was, how can you possibly make trees for people you don’t know?

Diana (2m 14s):
I did what I could to dig up information on two of my ancestors’ known associates and business partners. One, I got nowhere. The other, I learned he was just as colorful a character as my ancestor, but the real win came when I decided to make a quick tree for a man of the same name that I kept running across. My mouth dropped when I discovered these two men were first cousins once removed and this other man’s son was a name I recognized from a newspaper clipping as posting bail for my ancestor. Now I know who this mystery person is, and I’ve opened the door to potentially discovering more about my ancestor.” Well, that’s a fun review. I love it when something that we are talking about, give someone else an idea and leads to new discoveries.

Diana (2m 60s):
That’s so fun. So today on the podcast, we are going to talk about Mining Records For Research Opportunities. And we’re going to be talking a little bit about certification because Nicole is working this year to prepare her portfolio for certification through the Board for Certification of Genealogists, BCG. So we’re going to talk about portfolio element number three today, which is all about Document Work, where the applicant transcribes and analyzes a document then makes a research plan with ideas based on information in that document. So Nicole, tell us a little bit more about element number three.

Nicole (3m 41s):
Okay. I love that that review was kind of about the same subject with mining information from records to find associates and business partners and cousins and things, that’s wonderful. Certification portfolio element three is called Document Work and the Board for Certification of Genealogists has written a guide for application called the application guide. And in the section about Document Work, it says applicants for certification are sent a copy of an historical document that relates to the geographic areas and time periods in which they normally work. The document is chosen based on the research background the applicant specified on his or her application form.

Nicole (4m 26s):
So if you say that you’re a Southern United States researcher, they’ll maybe send you like a will or probate document from that time and place. So then what you’re required to do is several different treatments of the document. First, you would do a transcription, then an abstract summarizing the document, removing that boiler plate. And then you’d submit a statement, identifying a single research research question that you’ve identified from clues in that document, and then submitting an analysis of that document and the information found within it. And then lastly, a research plan with next steps to take from clues that you found in that document.

Nicole (5m 9s):
So this is a fun kind of framework for us today to discuss mining records for new research opportunities, because this is really what we’re doing here in this portfolio element. You have to understand the document and transcribe it, analyze it and come up with some ideas for research. So this is something that all of us can do when we’re researching in documents and we find a record about our ancestor. We can really look for all the clues that we can, that would lead us to new sources to search. So hopefully this discussion will be helpful to everyone, even if you’re not seeking certification.

Diana (5m 51s):
Well, I think it’ll be really helpful because part of the Research Like a Pro process is doing that timeline analysis. You look at every single document that you have on your ancestor and basically this is what you’re doing. You are mining it for new research opportunities, and we highly recommend that when you’re looking at these documents, you put all those ideas in your comments section of the analysis. And so this is perfect to go through this and I’m actually doing a research project right now on my second great-grandmother, Eliza Ann Isenhour, going back through all my old research and doing the exact same thing, taking each document, trying to mine it for new research opportunities.

Diana (6m 32s):
So I think this is a basic skill that we need to really make sure we are learning and doing consistently. So let’s talk a little bit about number three C for that part of the portfolio. So the first two were to transcribe and then abstract the documents. And that’s an important thing to do that. We’re not going to talk about that today. Instead, we’re going to start with number three C, which is identifying a single research question. So part of the Document Work for this person of certification is looking at the document that you’ll be sent and identifying a single research question from clues in the document.

Diana (7m 13s):
So here’s what the guide says, submit a statement identifying a single research question. The document mentioned several people and it states or implies events or circumstances related to them. Using that information propose in a sentence or two, a research question that identifies (A) who in the document you would envision researching and (B) what you would hope to find out about him, her or them by pursuing the search further. I have an example of that from a previous research project I did, and I didn’t do this for a portfolio or anything, this was for personal research and I had photocopied from the Family History Library a page from a book that was an, an abstract of a will of Georgia Dawson.

Diana (8m 2s):
And the reason that I was interested in that was because the abstract of the will named her nieces, Mary and Sarah Royston. Now this will was dated, I believe, 1861 and it was in Georgia. And I’m always looking for clues to who my Cynthia Royston’s family might be and so of course, I really went to this abstract of a will hoping to find a connection. So a research question from that will, there could be many, but my main one was who are these nieces, Mary and Sarah Royston and how are they connected to Georgia Dawson?

Diana (8m 45s):
How could they connect to my Cynthia Royston? That was my main research question. As soon as I saw that document. And then I went ahead and created an objective and an entire project to discover the answer to that question.

Nicole (8m 59s):
I have another fun example from a client project I did. And I’ve talked about this before, it’s John Johnson and he lived in North Carolina in Rowan county, and the client gave me the will of John Johnson and that was my starting document. So the client wanted to know who the parents of John Johnson were and the will was amazing because it actually stated that John’s father was named Abraham Johnson, and he was giving the land that his father, Abraham Johnson, had left to John, to his children. So that was a neat thing to find in a well, you don’t see that every day. Well, there were a lot of John Johnson’s in that county so I actually couldn’t do very much research to identify John’s father Abraham until I had identified which John was my John going back in time.

Nicole (9m 48s):
What I did is I really mined his will for information and came up with a sub-objective, like a research question within the overarching research question. So I looked at his will, and it mentioned that he had 11 children and that he owned a tract of land on Morse road and it was 275 acres. I decided that I would use that information about the land to help me figure out which John Johnson was which. So my research question from that will was where was the land that John Johnson owned? And I knew how many acres it was, and I knew the road that it was on, but it would take some research to figure out more about that in land records and in maps.

Nicole (10m 37s):
And that was just one part of the project to do that.

Diana (10m 41s):
That’s so fun that you got so much information out of that will. And as you were talking about that, I thought you could have taken several different research questions from that will. There was so much information in it.

Nicole (10m 54s):
Yeah. There were two witnesses that were not his family members, and then it also listed off his children’s names. So I actually created several sub objectives from this that I would come back to once I identified the land, another objective I had was to identify where all the children mentioned in the world lived and where they moved to. So that helped identify John as well. Just figuring out that his children kind of all lived in the same part of the county.

Diana (11m 19s):
I think a good practice would be to do a list of questions. Just write down everything that you can think of, that you could research based on this one document, that’s how you’re going to mine your documents for all the research opportunities. And I think once we start to write things down, we get one idea out of our head. So that makes room in our brain for another idea. So if you don’t get the main things out, you may not hit upon the lesser ideas for research, but once you have them all written down, then you’ve got so many different things that you could do a specific project on. So I love that idea of just writing down as many things as you can think about from a single document.

Nicole (12m 1s):
Yes, that’s a great idea. I love the brainstorming aspect of genealogy research. I think that’s where a lot of our best ideas come from when we are really looking at a document and trying to think of all the different possibilities. Okay. Let’s talk about the next part of this Document Work. After creating a research question from document, we need to analyze the document. So the application guide says to submit an analysis of the data in the document related to the research question you proposed in item three C. Your analysis must address concepts set forth in standards 35 through 45, the application guide references, genealogy standards, which is another publication of the Board for Certification of Genealogists.

Nicole (12m 45s):
And it’s important that genealogists read these standards and understand them because it really helps us understand the principles behind good genealogy work. So standards 35 through 45 are all about analysis. So breaking it down 35 through 39 are about source information and evidence analysis and source and information preference, basically that we prefer to use original sources and information from eyewitnesses or participants in the event, then standards 40 and 41 are kind of about evidence mining and scope. So I’ll talk about those more in detail in a minute, and then standards 42 through 45, or about evidence discrimination and evidence integrity and reliability and assumptions.

Nicole (13m 33s):
So since our episode today is about evidence mining or mining new research opportunities from a document, let’s read that standard. So standard number 40 Evidence Mining: genealogists obtain evidence from information items and sets of information items. They seek evidence items that answer research questions directly, indirectly or negatively. Evidence mining requires attention to detail, including details that might initially seem insignificant. Genealogists ignore no potentially useful evidence, including indirect and negative evidence or evidence that might conflict with, or complicate a working hypothesis.

Nicole (14m 15s):
And they give equal attention to direct, indirect, negative evidence. So there’s so much in there, but one of the things that stands out to me is to not ignore any pieces of evidence because they don’t fit your hypothesis. Isn’t that funny?

Diana (14m 29s):
Yeah. And I agree with that. Sometimes we want to sweep those under the rug because we have this nice, neat and tidy hypothesis, and then a piece of information comes up that doesn’t fit. Oh, so frustrating and so annoying, but that is going to happen in every research project. And we have to learn how to work with that. We can’t just ignore it.

Nicole (14m 50s):
Yeah. So another thing mentioned in that standard is that we need to look for evidence items that answer the question, whether directly or indirectly or negatively. So often we’ll find a lot of clues that don’t answer our question directly, but we can still use those pieces of indirect evidence to help us. And that’s kind of what we need are mostly talking about when mining these records, because we are looking for the things that the record doesn’t state explicitly. So here’s an example from another Johnson report that I did, this was back a little further in time with William Johnson and he lived in the late 1600s and early 1700s died in about 1709.

Nicole (15m 32s):
And in his will, he mentioned his smith tools. And so from that, we can deduce that he was probably a blacksmith. Sometimes in a will you might be able to figure out the occupation of a person just based on the items that they’re leaving to their heirs, even if they don’t explicitly say that they are smith tools like this will did. Another thing in this will from William Johnson was that he left some money to his children, but then he also left an inheritance to his beloved friend Hardy Council. And this was an enormous clue that when I followed this man, Hardy Council, I found that he was interrelated with a lot of other Johnsons.

Nicole (16m 15s):
And it really became evidence for which Johnson family, this William Johnson was probably a member of. And so mining that will, for every little piece of indirect evidence helped lead me to a better conclusion.

Diana (16m 30s):
That’s great. You had some really fun clues in that will. So many times we just have boilerplate language and the wills and the names of the heirs, but it’s so fun when you get some specific things like that. You know, when you’re talking about the tools, I was thinking about another part of the probate file that comes after a will, and that’s the inventory of the estate that can be really illuminating also when you see what types of things were on the estate, and that can give you clues to the occupation of the person. So I would be willing to bet that if the inventory had survived, it would give more details about all of his tools and perhaps other things that he had few of the blacksmith in his shops.

Diana (17m 10s):
So that’s why it’s important when we get something like a will to look for all the estate records and transcribe all of them to find the little clues. So I’ve got kind of a fun example of indirect and negative evidence from the project I just did this week, and this was a client project and I’m just going to call them the Smith family. So this is a family that was in early Virginia. They first show up about 1705 and then they sort of disappear and the client’s ancestor ends up in Tennessee. So I’m trying to figure out if he came from this particular Smith family in this county in Virginia. So I saw that FamilySearch all the tax lists from 1782 to 1823, I believe.

Diana (17m 58s):
So I did an extraction of all the different Smiths in this county. And I discovered that there was a man, call him John Smith, and he shows up in the tax lists in 1785. He’s not there in 1782, 83 or 84. So in 1785, something happened that he would show up, and reading the very first page of the tax list that talked about how men who were above the age of 21 had to be taxed. And so at first I thought that because he shows up first in 1785, that must have been when he turned 21, but then doing all of the tax lists, I noticed that John Smith was always next to Aaron Smith.

Diana (18m 48s):
And I started to hypothesize that this could be his father because these two were always together and others of the same name were on a different man’s tax list in the same year, but they weren’t necessarily always together. And then I noticed that in 1782 and 1783 and 84, Aaron Smith has two tithables in his household. And then all of a sudden in 1785, he only has one tithable. And John Smith appears, well, there you go. So there, we have some pretty strong, indirect evidence that John is the son of Aaron and that John turned 21, probably I think it was 1783, where he shows up as two tithables and that was the year I needed to use to estimate a birth year, not 1785 when he shows up listed under his own name, but when he shows up in his father’s household.

Diana (19m 44s):
So that was really interesting looking very, very specifically at those tax lists. And then Aaron Smith disappears after 1788. He is not on the tax list at all after that. And instead with the next to John, there’s a woman named Tabitha Smith. So, you know, again, there is some pretty strong negative evidence that Aaron has died and indirect evidence that Tabitha could be his wife, because the women showed up when they were the widows and she’s still listed next to John. So just doing that mining of evidence from those tax lists really opened up another generation.

Diana (20m 29s):
This man was not listed in any probate. Left no will. So basically these tax lists are the only evidence I have for his life and for putting together a family.

Nicole (20m 43s):
Wow. Did Tabitha have to pay taxes on the property, or was she also a tithable at that point when she was the head of household?

Diana (20m 51s):
She was not tithable, she, that is a zero in her column and she was just doing taxes on property.

Nicole (20m 58s):
Aha. Very cool.

Diana (21m 0s):
Yeah.

Nicole (21m 0s):
That’s a very good example of mining that tax list for all these seemingly insignificant details that one and two in the column for tithable and really trying to see what that could mean. You really used that for some great evidence there.

Diana (21m 17s):
Well, and another thing that I noticed was the property. So Aaron Smith consistently had quite a bit of property, a lot of cattle and horses, and John Smith when he is first listed has nothing. He’s just the tithable. He has no property, which is another really good clue that he’s just a young man starting out. And then gradually, I think he gets a horse. So we have to look at that whole body of evidence as for trying to mind for every little detail.

Nicole (21m 46s):
Good job correlating that together. So I’m going to go back to my example of John Johnson’s will, you know, the blacksmith who had left his smith tools. And he had also left that tract of land on Morris road. So I found a land record where one of the sons of John Johnson had sold 275 acres and the land description in that deed said that it was on the waters of Cabin Creek. So now I know the road and the creek that the land was on. So mining that deed for the land that John left to his son helped to identify where John lived. And I figured out that he lived on this Cabin Creek and this south Eastern part of the county.

Nicole (22m 30s):
Another thing that the deed said was that the land was originally conveyed to John Johnson by Ogle. And that little clue Ogle was really nagging at me. I wondered who’s Ogle? So I ended up going back in the deeds and finding the land conveyed by, I think it was Thomas Ogle and finding the line of conveyance there from Thomas Ogle to this guy named Mark something or other, and then he conveyed it to someone else until it finally, it was conveyed to John Johnson. So that one little word Ogle was really helpful because it helped me to see that I had the right land in the right place.

Nicole (23m 11s):
So my name that deed was really helpful because it gave me a new specific location, Cabin Creek, and the person who owned the land originally. And often you’ll find that in deeds, it’ll say who the land was originally granted to or where it originally came from. Have you seen that before?

Diana (23m 27s):
Yes, I have. And that’s been super helpful. In fact, sometimes they’ll give who originally got it from the state or the federal government, and that can be helpful. So the other thing I want to mention with land records is that just following the number of acres that can help determine men of the same name. If you’ve got somebody receiving 160 acres, then they sell a 160 acres that can really help to figure out who is who. So that’s another detail that we need to mine as well as sometimes the neighbors are listed. So land records can have so many good details that we may not think are important to our cases where they are utmost important, but, you know, we really can’t use those records unless we have done a complete transcription of them.

Diana (24m 13s):
So to sound like a broken record, when you get these tough records, it’s so important to do a complete transcription and then just put that in a Google doc, link to it in your research log, and then you’ve got it. You may think that it’s a pain and it’s going to take so much time, that then you’ve got it and then you can really mine it for the details. Because who wants to go back and read that old handwriting over and over and over. If you just do it once then you can continue to use it. So that’s a really helpful research tip for anyone listening.

Nicole (24m 43s):
It is. I love looking at my transcriptions and just being able to pick out the details without having to try to read the handwriting. All right, let’s talk about standard 41, cause we’re still analyzing the document and mining it for details. And 41 talks about Evidence Scope. The standard says genealogists obtain much of their evidence from information naming people of interest or their possible relatives, neighbors and associates. Genealogists also obtain useful evidence from sources that do not name these people. These include histories of the area, its population and relevant time periods and works describing customs governance, laws, and regulations. Well, this is fun because we just talked about that last week in our episode about adding context to genealogical writing, didn’t we?

Diana (25m 31s):
Yes, this is perfect.

Nicole (25m 32s):
The first half of that standard was about looking for evidence and information naming our subject, but also their relatives, neighbors, and associates. Let’s talk about that for a minute. I have an example with my John Johnson project again. After I’d figured out that he lived at cabin Creek, I started looking at tax records to put together a neighborhood grouping for him and I noticed that the people who witnessed his will were also living near to him right before he died. So that helped me figure out which neighborhood group was the right one. And then I started listing out all the names of the people in that neighborhood group and once I had done that, I had a really helpful list of names to figure out from the census records, which John was which.

Nicole (26m 19s):
So then I could really trace them back in time through each census year, 1800 and then 1790 looking into those FANs was really helpful, friends, associates and neighbors.

Diana (26m 31s):
I love doing the FAN research. I think that that’s one of the major takeaways from learning so much more about genealogy. Once I decided to become accredited, I don’t know that I had put that to as much practice previously, but that has been so key. So the other thing that standard 41 talks about is using sources that don’t name people. So histories of an area and works describing customs governance, laws, and regulations. And I love doing this using the context or history to help solve a case. And an example of this that I mentioned in the previous episode. And I’m just going to talk about it again because it’s so perfect.

Diana (27m 14s):
I had wondered why my Roystons in Virginia, they were in Gloucester county and they’ve been there all along, and so I’m just thinking, why did they all of a sudden up and move to, to the Carolinas and Georgia in the 1780s? And I came across an account by a woman, an historical account, and she talks about a hurricane that came through in the late 1780s, completely inundated the land and the land was inundated with salt and it was unusable and nobody could farm it. So that made sense that even though they might’ve been large land holders, that you’ve had a major disaster, you can’t use the land. You’re going to have to move on.

Diana (27m 56s):
Just that little bit of context helped to put this together because I was trying to make that jump back. And so often we have that with that ancestor who just keeps migrating and trying to make the connection between the two men and that is where the history comes into play learning, why people were moving to really help us put the pieces together.

Nicole (28m 17s):
That’s so true. And I love that. It says in the standard, looking at sources that don’t name our individual. We just didn’t know that when we first started and we would only look in the index for our name. So now we understand that that book is useful even if it doesn’t name our ancestors, because it tells us about the time and place and the context.

Diana (28m 37s):
And it might have our FAN club in it also, people that are mentioned in other records that make up the community of our ancestor.

Nicole (28m 46s):
Exactly.

Diana (28m 46s):
So let’s talk about the next step where this bit of the process, we have looked at the document, come up with our research question. We’ve analyzed the document, mined it for all the different clues. And then we have to create a research plan from the information that we mined. So the application guide says to submit a research plan one page or less describing the first steps for continuing research to resolve the question. So you must base the plan on clues found within the document and on sound research methods, standard genealogical sources, and materials specific to the area time period and subject of this record.

Diana (29m 31s):
And then second, you must identify fully any publications, personnel, repositories, or records, and the records could be original in print or electronic, that you would normally consult in following that plan. So you’re doing a research plan basically, and you’re going to describe your methodology and you’re going to be specific with what records you’re going to search. So this follows the genealogical standards, number nine for planned research and number 10 for effective research questions. And then also talks about number 11, which says research plans seek unknown or forgotten information about a specific person, family group, event, or situation plans begin with analyzing starting point information for accuracy.

Diana (30m 23s):
Plans also avoid assumptions about people and events the documentation does not support.

Nicole (30m 28s):
That’s a really important one.

Diana (30m 30s):
Yeah, because I think sometimes we do have assumptions. Our ancestor could never have done that, or never could have been there, this couldn’t be the same person. So we’ve got to make sure we’re keeping an open mind. So more standards about research planning, are number 12, that we have a broad context. Number 13, that it’s source-based content, 14 topical breadth, 15 efficient sequence. So there are so many things relating to research planning. I would highly recommend everyone pull out Genealogy Standards. If you don’t have it, purchase a copy and really dive into the research planning standards.

Diana (31m 11s):
Those are great. And then finally, number 16, flexibility, genealogical research plans may initially comprise only one or few resources as genealogists follow the plan materials they examine might not provide the expected information, provide unexpected information or suggest further resources to examine consequently genealogists repeatedly add to or otherwise modify their research plans. And I love this because we always recommend to just put about five steps on your research plan, because depending on what you find in steps, one through five, you may completely go a different direction. What are your thoughts on that?

Nicole (31m 52s):
I agree. We could spend all day making a research plan with 20 items, but what if we find the answer in the fourth item on our prioritize list? You know, all those other items we listed out, we didn’t really need to. So one thing that stood out to me in the standards about research planning is that we need to be flexible and we might find unexpected information that leads us down different paths. So it’s good to be willing to amend our plan so that we can meet our research objective.

Diana (32m 23s):
Yeah. I love that. I think there’s just so many good details about research planning and those standards. I really like reviewing those links so glad we’re doing that. Well, let me just give a little example of what I did with my Georgia Dawson research plan. So I talked about this at the beginning of this episode, how I really just started with an abstract of a will. So I couldn’t create much of a research plan until I actually found the will. So that was kind of my inherent first thing that I did was I found the real copy of the will and then I used that to create my research plan. And so I wanted to look for her in the census records and I want to look for a marriage record for her and I wanted to look for other probate in the county to see if possibly she had a father that named her in a probate.

Diana (33m 14s):
So I created a list of about five things like we teach. And in the course of the research, that led me to a few other things that hadn’t originally been in my plan, but that’s how it works. And in the course of that project, I was able to solve the mystery. And it turned out that her nieces, Sarah and Mary Royston were the daughters of her older sister who had married a man who was not even related to my Roystons. So it didn’t come out to be anything that helped my actual research, but it took care of that piece of paper that I’d been wondering about for a long time. I could finally put it to rest and sometimes that’s as helpful as actually finding the answer to your person’s relationships.

Diana (34m 2s):
You can just eliminate something.

Nicole (34m 4s):
That’s a good example. My example is continuing with John Johnson’s will and the deed that showed where his land was like I mentioned before, I had also used some tax records. My research plan was very fluid. I started with wanting to find out more about where his land was and using a lot of land records. And once I had found everything I could from the land records, I added to my plan to look in tax records and census records. And it was flexible as I went along, I kind of added in some things to search for friends and associates. I looked up that land and figured out where the land came from originally.

Nicole (34m 47s):
So that was something I had added to my plan. Once I found that deed that had the Ogle in it. So I would say this plan that I did was pretty flexible. So I started off with just like one or two things on it. And then as I went, I added more to it.

Diana (35m 3s):
Well, I think it’s time to wrap up this episode. You’ve given some really great examples of your John Johnson project. And I think we’ve talked about some things that are really key to our research in taking our documents and identifying a research question from those documents and then really analyzing that document or multiple documents if we might have them and then making a research plan, this is just key. This is good genealogy. And this is how we actually make progress. I hope everybody listening will maybe revisit something that you thought was nothing else to find and see if you can mind that document for additional research opportunities.

Diana (35m 48s):
See if there’s something you just never noticed before.

Nicole (35m 50s):
All right. Thanks everyone for listening. And we hope you have a great week. Bye-bye

Diana (35m 56s):
bye-bye

Nicole (35m 56s):
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.