RLP 95: How to Use the FAN Club in Research

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 95. How to Use the FAN Club in Research. 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. Let’s go.

Nicole (45s):
Hi everyone and welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer. Co-host of Research Like a Pro and I’m here with Diana. How are you, Diana?

Diana (52s):
I’m great. Nicole, how are you doing?

Nicole (55s):
Doing well. We had a nice morning sunny and it went for a run and it was nice. How about you?

Diana (1m 1s):
Yes, we’re finally in good weather and I’m getting my garden planted and tulips are blooming. So I have my very own little tulip festival because the big one here is closed down. So I’m glad I have some things in my own yard to enjoy.

Nicole (1m 16s):
That’s good.

Diana (1m 18s):
Today I’m excited to be talking about the FAN Club research principle and to tell our listeners about a fun project that I just completed last week using the FAN Club.

Nicole (1m 30s):
I’m excited to hear all about it, and I’ve been doing some research as well that was solved by using the FAN Club. So it’s really useful in these difficult cases that are brick walls.

Diana (1m 41s):
Exactly. We talk a lot about the FAN Club and for our listeners, if you’ve heard other genealogists speak, you’ve often heard that, but you may not really know exactly where it came from. So let’s just get into a little bit of a review before we get into how I use that to solve this case. Elizabeth Shown Mills, who is one of our genealogy scholars and leaders developed the principle. I think it had been around for a while, but she named it. And I think it’s just really helpful to have this little acronym of F A N standing for Friends, Associates and Neighbors, because we don’t have to go into details. Later, other genealogists have expanded that to include family members.

Diana (2m 23s):
So just think of the Fs as friends and extended family members, and then the associates and neighbors of the family. You know, this is something that might seem a little foreign. You might think, why would I want to research anybody except for my ancestors? Well, because that is how you solve some of these challenging things.

Nicole (2m 44s):
Agreed. Let’s go over some examples of FAN Club members. Like you said, the F stands for family and friends, and that could be extended family. Often we will find that they have different surnames. And so at first we might not realize that they’re family when we see their name on a document with our ancestor, and then as the research progresses, we realized that, oh, this is a son-in-law or brother-in-law, somebody with a different surname, but they were really close. And if you think about your own extended family group, think about all the names that are present there. In my family we have Dyers, but then I also have Elders and then I have Clarks and Barkers and I have all kinds of surnames in my extended family. So we have to kind of think of it that way for our ancestors, too.

Nicole (3m 26s):
There’s going to be in-laws, cousins, half-siblings, step siblings. And it’s important to think about the step relationships because their family can often become part of the FAN Club. Next is associates: these will be people that our ancestors came into contact through business or through court cases. Maybe they shared the same occupation and that kind of thing. So like maybe your ancestor was selling their land. Well, the person they sold it to is an associate. It could be somebody that they knew, could be somebody that they were related to, you never know until you research that person. In a Probate record, you would want to know all the people listed there, like the executors and the administrators and the sureties and the witnesses.

Nicole (4m 10s):
And these are all associates as well. Witnesses are important because they are people usually that live nearby or that the person knew. So make sure that you keep track of all these witnesses. Also people who are involved in court cases, like I mentioned, if they were giving a deposition about another person, it usually meant that they knew that person. Sometimes they will be mentioned on the court case as the person who was recording it. There’s all kinds of people mentioned in these files. So we’d just keep track of all of them. And lastly neighbors, that’s the N in FAN Club. This could be people that are members of the same church. These are neighbors who are located near each other according to census records that were not alphabetized, people who bought land near each other, often in a land description, you will see the names of other people whose land border, your ancestor’s land, and those people’s names should be tracked and recorded as well.

Diana (5m 6s):
Thank you for that summary. And one thing that came to mind when you were talking about the probate records was bondsman and anyone who is putting up money as a bond for a marriage or for a probate, or what have you. Those are really important people to look at because for one thing: they were putting up the money. So they’re not just going to be some random person. What are some instances where you could use the FAN Club, if you’re just going along and you’re doing some easy research, attaching hints, things are falling into place, and you may not have come across a situation where you would need it. But as soon as you hit a brick wall and we’re all going to hit that sooner or later, then that’s when we expand and use the FAN Club.

Diana (5m 50s):
And so some examples where you might want to do that, is if you’re not finding any direct evidence, there’s no record that is stating your ancestor is the son or daughter of a suspected parents. So you might need to use the FAN Club to expand your research and build a case of indirect evidence. Now, what if you are researching in a big city and you’ve got so many people of the same name, and you’re trying to decide which John Smith is your John Smith? While the FAN Club can really help that because you can look at all of his associates and see if your John Smith who was a blacksmith and had the friend of John Jones, is different from the other John Smith who lived on the other side of town and was an attorney.

Diana (6m 39s):
So we can look at the associates of these people when we’re in big cities, trying to figure out who was who. In the case study we’re going to use today we are working with the surname of Jones. And so if you have a common surname in your family, and who doesn’t, often it is the FAN Club that helps you trace them and figure out which is your person. Now, when we are dealing with people who have come from another country like Germany or Sweden or England, and we’re trying to figure out which family they belong to, often if we can see that they’re listed on a ship list with a certain person, we can trace that person back and see the two of them in the home country together and that can help us to determine the correct family.

Diana (7m 25s):
In these cases of people moving to a place that’s brand new, when we look at their associates, we can connect them back to a prior residence. And I’ve used that principle in a lot of my research in the south because of this migration that took place in 1800s. So another instance is when you have limited record availability, if you are working in a burned county where things were just gone, maybe all you have are census records or tax records. Then you start looking at those neighbors, like Nicole mentioned, who else is in the census. It becomes more difficult, but through really good tracking methods and really good record keeping, you can actually make progress on some of these difficult things using the FAN Club.

Diana (8m 15s):
Finally, if you’ve got a case where you just have absolutely no idea who the parents could be, then looking at the associates and tracking all of them could turn up something that would help you to figure out who the parents are. Sometimes even if a name has changed, looking at all of those different people can reveal some interesting things. And of course with DNA now we can use that as further evidence. So there are so many different things that we can do with the FAN Club. It’s really a great principle to work with.

Nicole (8m 49s):
When you mentioned the DNA aspect of the FAN Club, it just has made me realize that when we do research with DNA sources and evidence and incorporate all these DNA matches into our body of evidence, we really are just using an expanded FAN Club, aren’t we, because all of these DNA matches are really the test takers’ FAN Club, and they give evidence when you build them out far enough of relatives. So that’s kind of the same thing we’re looking for with this FAN Club is that if we learn about this person, like a DNA match, or a witness on a deed, we hopefully can find their family relations and see how they link into our family.

Nicole (9m 33s):
That’s a really good point, it really is great to bring DNA into the FAN Club. And often with our FAN Club, they will be just a friend and not related at all. However, that can still be useful. So let’s talk about that. Often in the United States, we have groups of people who were migrating and moving west. Our ancestors typically started out as immigrants from Europe, at least in our family. And then they started off in the colonies and every generation they get a little further west and it’s sometimes difficult to figure out where they came from and that can lead to a brick wall. And if they have surnames that are common, then how do we know which person to trace back?

Nicole (10m 16s):
Well, one strategy that we can use is tracing neighbors of our relatives who have a less common surname. And we can use that friend or neighbor to get some ideas for where this whole group immigrated from assuming that they came together. So that could be an, a really effective tool for figuring out where these families migrated from when they have a common name. Sometimes we’ll find a lot of clues of different people who are mentioned in the records of our ancestors, and we won’t know how they tie in at first. And then as we keep track of them all in a spreadsheet, then we’ll start to notice patterns like maybe the same person shows up on several of the families records and the daughter married a man with that name.

Nicole (10m 57s):
And then we can figure out the relationship that maybe there was no direct evidence of, I think often when there’s limited record availability, we are using these kinds of pieces of evidence where we only know that a daughter is related to her parents because her husband was a bondsman and a witness on the parent’s information. So sometimes we are piecing together these little tiny clues like that. Another strategy is one we’ve mentioned already, and that is researching these common surnames where we don’t know who’s who. And so we have to kind of build out a community group for that person. And I think I’ve talked about this before a little bit with the, on the podcast about my John Johnson case, where there were six John Johnson’s in 1790, and the only way to really separate them out was to use their neighborhood grouping as the unique identifier for them.

Nicole (11m 49s):
So the only way that I could know which John was which, was by looking at his neighborhood and each of his neighbors that he was mentioned with on the tax records was kind of like a unique birthdate almost, like the same type of thing, because I knew that he always appeared with that same group of people. So that is another strategy for people with the same surname. And then another strategy that’s useful is when we’re researching for our people in certain ethnic groups, we can use the records for that community group and try to build out the trees of all those people. So maybe like Eastern European Jews who came and lived together in the same part of the city and had the same newspapers, and understanding that can help us build a FAN Club of this ethnic group.

Diana (12m 35s):
Yeah, those are all really good examples. That reminds me of an African-American research project that I did. The 1870 census, you know, after emancipation, the household of this ancestor included I think, three different surnames and following those out, the surnames kept changing. And so it was really just taking that family grouping regardless of the surname and trying to trace those people out that finally resulted in figuring out the family. So African-American research does have its own unique challenges and the FAN Club is absolutely so important. Another thing that I wanted to mention was often we just tend to skip over those little clues.

Diana (13m 21s):
So when you do a complete research project one of the things that we teach in the Research Like a Pro process is to go back to those previously found documents and to really scour those for details that we just skipped over the first time and the FAN Club is really one of those details that we want to go back and find, because that makes the difference.

Nicole (13m 45s):
That really does make a difference. I’m just thinking of the case I was working on this last weekend where I didn’t have any direct evidence tying a daughter into the family, but I was pretty sure that she belonged to these parents. And I had gathered a lot of evidence that they lived in the same place and that the 1810 and 1820 and 1830 census, there was a daughter that could be this woman, but I wanted just a couple more pieces of evidence while the main things that I ended up finding that really clinched it were that her husband was listed on the hypothesized father’s probate record as somebody who purchased from his estate. And later, one of the proven sons on his probate record this woman’s husband was also a surety for the administration.

Nicole (14m 34s):
So those two little pieces that he was really a close associate to the father’s estate and also to the brothers, I felt were really good clues putting the nail in the coffin that she really was the daughter.

Diana (14m 48s):
Those are great clues. Those inventories are so interesting, and this was an estate sale. So you got to see what they bought. That’s a great example of something that we might just skip over, but that’s full of really good clues because those people that were purchasing things, they may have just been somebody across the county, but often they were the close associates, family and neighbors.

Nicole (15m 10s):
Yeah. As I have researched the people in those lists, I have found that almost all of them are family and close neighbors. Even the widow of the person who died was buying things. I wish I understood a little bit more about that, but it seems like the family was kind of purchasing the things that were important to them.

Diana (15m 31s):
Yes. And often if they were going to continue running the farm or plantation, they needed to purchase the tools and all the implements that would be needed. So you’ll see plows and all the animals, you’ll see everything being purchased. I think it was just a legal thing that they had to purchase that so that they could continue running things. That’s a good point, we need to probably explore that more and learning about the laws and why that had to happen. Always something new to learn, right?

Nicole (16m 1s):
Right. Well, let’s talk about your case study now with identifying the parents and grandparents of John Jones using the FAN Club. So I know this was a client project you did. Can you tell us what the objective was?

Diana (16m 16s):
Sure. So I think everyone listening can recognize right away, one of the problems and how many John Jones are there going to be in the United States? Quite a few. So the client wanted to research the ancestry and siblings of John E Jones, who was born December of 1866 in Florida, and then died in 1927 in Arizona. And he was married in 1891 in Texas. So here we have one of those migrating ancestors. So how do you go about figuring this out with such a common name and such a huge jump in migration from Florida to Texas to Arizona?

Diana (16m 57s):
So the first thing I always do with a client project is go through everything that’s been found already. And we had the census records starting in 1900, nothing before 1900. So these were already out west. We had three different birth dates, 1866, 67 and 68, is so common on the census records to get varying birth dates. But then a really important piece of evidence was on the marriage record for John Jones, where he named his parents himself, which is gold, right. He named his parents, this John Edmond Jones with an unknown birthplace and Virginia Stanford born in Virginia.

Diana (17m 38s):
So that seems really good. We’ve got names there, and a maiden name, let should be very easy to find, right? Well, not so easy because of these common names. There turns out to be lots of John Joneses in Florida and the south, and Virginia Stanford born in Virginia, maybe 1840. There’s no birth records in Virginia in 1840. I mean, that’s just like taking a stab in the dark. What do we do in a situation like that? You work with what, you know, rather than going off and trying to research all the Joneses in Florida or all the Stanfords in Virginia, because that’s going to be really difficult.

Diana (18m 21s):
Now, the client had also found another really interesting piece of evidence, and this was a death certificate of a woman named Francis L Bishop and the parent names on her death certificate were Edmund Jones and Mary V Stanford, do those sound familiar? Yes, they do. When I looked to that, that immediately just jumped out to me as somebody important to research. That was my very first part of the research plan. Who is this Francis L Bishop? Is she a sibling to John? So she is kind of a backdoor associate because we don’t even know if the two knew each other at this point, or just have this record that has similar parents.

Diana (19m 8s):
But I identified her as a member of the FAN Club because those parents names were so very similar. And I decided I would just research Fanny.

Nicole (19m 15s):
That’s a good strategy to just take a break from researching and the person of focus and see if this person who has similar to parent names could tie in to your research objective. Before we go on, I just had a question. You probably already said this, but what was that record where John names his parents?

Diana (19m 34s):
It was his marriage record. It was actually his third marriage that named it. His first two did not, but the third marriage, it was in the 1920s in Arizona and it asked for parent names.

Nicole (19m 48s):
That’s great. And he spelled out the full name, John Edmund Jones, how great.

Diana (19m 53s):
I know it really was great. And you would think with that, you could figure it out.

Nicole (19m 57s):
The problem was that probably on the census records, they didn’t spell it out and say John Edmund Jones. So you were looking at John Jones’s and there were probably a lot of them.

Diana (20m 7s):
Exactly. And the client had done a lot of research on a John Jones and a Virginia. There was a John Jones and a Virginia in Florida, the exact time period. And she had given me a great spreadsheet proving this was not the family, but I believe this family is attached to him on a lot of Ancestry trees because people haven’t done that exhaustive research.

Nicole (20m 30s):
Oh, wow. So this was like a case of disproving, some seeming direct evidence from other people’s trees with more indirect evidence and using the FAN Club.

Diana (20m 44s):
Absolutely. So when I went to identify Fanny, I decided the easiest thing is going to be just looking in the census. And I found her in two censuses in 1900 and in 1920, I never could find her in 1910. And sometimes that just happens. And because that, wasn’t the real focus of this project, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time doing that. But in 1900 and 1920, I discovered that she was a widow, and she identified her daughter. In one census she was Elizabeth and in 1920, the household was the numerated twice. And the daughter was Bessie in one and Virginia and the other.

Diana (21m 23s):
And I knew it was her because she had three children. She only had one living. And it was that daughter who was living with her the entire time. And the daughter was the informant on the death certificate. And so this Ms. Elizabeth Bishop had named the parents as Edmund Jones and Mary V Stanford. When I thought that Elizabeth also was called Virginia, then I’m starting to get a little excited here thinking this is starting to connect a little bit. And guess where she was born? Francis also known as Fannie was born in Florida. And her birth year was 1858, which would make her an older sister to John Jones born 1866.

Diana (22m 10s):
So I continued looking for her and I found her obituary and the obituary was great because it gave the birth place of Hillsborough county, Florida. And that’s what you’re always looking for is the county. So that was super exciting. The funny thing though, was in obituary, it gave the city as Gatesville. Well, there is no Gatesville, Hillsborough county, Florida. So in doing a little research, Gatesville is in Texas and that was the big city near where Fannie and Elizabeth were living. So my guess is that Elizabeth wrote the obituary. She was also the death certificate informant, and she had heard this name and she just thought it was Gatesville, but she associated that with the city she knew because she’d never been to Florida.

Diana (23m 1s):
So that’s going to play into the case a little bit later, but I thought that was interesting.

Nicole (23m 6s):
So you have some pretty good information now on this possible sister to John. And so what did you do next?

Diana (23m 13s):
Well, I needed to really find them in the census. So doing a search for Fanny, she was born in 1858, supposedly in Florida. So she should be in 1860 census of Hillsborough. And she was right there. The family was Edmond and Virginia Jones and Fannie was aged two. Of course, John Jones is going to be in the family yet because he was born in 1866. But how great is that, there we have Edmond and Virginia and we have Fanny in Hillsborough, and there were also several other children. They are

Nicole (23m 44s):
That’s so nice when you find them on a census, because now you have identifying information for these names. You have an exact place that they lived and you have birth year calculations from their ages and birth places. Like now you have an actual profile of a person.

Diana (24m 1s):
Right. And the interesting thing is, remember that John had said his mother, Virginia was born in Virginia. Well, on the census, Virginia was born in Georgia, so that’s a little different. And sometimes that can throw us off. If we get too stuck on a birth place. John provided the information about Virginia being born in Virginia on his marriage record. But that was long after the fact and he was older and we’re going to see why he might have thought that later on, I’m not going to reveal that yet. So we just have to remember, even if it’s just the actual person giving the information about their parents, it could be wrong.

Diana (24m 44s):
Yeah.

Nicole (24m 44s):
They gave secondary information. Maybe they forgot or misremembered, or just didn’t know because they weren’t there at the birth.

Diana (24m 52s):
So I wanted to move back in time. I had a really good clue about where Edmund and Virginia were living in 1850 because that 1860 census gave birthplaces at the children. And it showed a migration, Mississippi, and then the younger children born in Florida. So I went to Mississippi to see if I could find them on the 1850 census and found them easily in Jackson county, Mississippi. And it had their first born son, Thomas, which matched the 1860 census. And as I was looking at that census, I noticed right above the census listing the names of Daniel and Mary A Stanford.

Diana (25m 34s):
Okay, you remember who Stanford is?

Nicole (25m 38s):
Virginia.

Diana (25m 38s):
That is the surname of Virginia. At that point, you know, I did the genealogy happy dance because this was probably her parents. Now, since she was supposedly born in Virginia, what about the Georgia connection? Well, both of them said that they were born in Georgia. She again says she was born in Georgia. So I’m beginning to think that the Virginia connection that was not correct, but I was excited to find this name of possible parents for Virginia. Now just because I find Stanford’s next to Virginia, and Fannie and John both said her maiden name was Stanford, that doesn’t mean I can positively connect them as parents, right?

Nicole (26m 16s):
Right.

Diana (26m 17s):
So I wanted to go a little further back and see when Edmond and Virginia married, because if I could find a marriage record, maybe that would have her parents listed and give me more information. I decided I better try to figure out where they were before 1850. Mississippi has these great state census is in between federal years. So on the 1845 states census, there was Daniel Stanford again. But guess where he was? He was all the way at the top of the state. So Jackson county is the very southern part of Mississippi. Yalobusha county is the very Northern part of the state of Mississippi. So he made a big migration from 1845 to 1850.

Diana (26m 59s):
He probably took the river, went down. In his household he’s got two females and then a male. So it looks like him and Marianne and Virginia. And I looked for some Joneses, are there any Joneses also here in the county. And I found a JE Jones who had a large household with six males that could have been the father of Edmond. And the cool thing is that Tennessee is just right across the border and guess where Edmond was born?

Nicole (27m 27s):
Tennessee!

Diana (27m 27s):
Tennessee. So we’ve got the Stanfords and Joneses in both counties of Mississippi, and they were not neighboring counties. They were far away. So this is the migration that looks like it was not accidental. They were traveling together.

Nicole (27m 43s):
Yes. And they used naming patterns in this family, didn’t they?

Diana (27m 47s):
Yeah, absolutely.

Nicole (27m 48s):
Is this going to be three generations of John Edmond Jones?

Diana (27m 52s):
It very well could be, and I didn’t go any further back, but what a great place to start the research for the Jones family now, rather than just taking a stab in the dark, who could be the father of Edmund Jones, we’ve got the 1845 census with a J E Jones and guess what, there were about five or six other Jones men listed there that could be traced to Tennessee, to see if those same men did the same migration. So in a common name, so very helpful to have those others to help you trace.

Nicole (28m 25s):
And I bet it’s easier to trace the name Daniel Stanford than it is to trace John Jones.

Diana (28m 32s):
Yes. Cause Daniel Stanford is much more unusual. There just weren’t any others that I saw in the censuses. Now, the interesting thing is that searching for marriage records, I really reasoned that they probably got married there in Yalobusha county and doing the research discovered that Book A of the marriage records that covered that period, of course is missing. That’s why the client had probably not been able to find the marriage. And that actually is a bit of negative evidence for this, that the reason the marriage isn’t showing up is because that specific county book is not in existence anymore.

Diana (29m 14s):
So I have got these two families in Yalobusha in the north of Mississippi and then 10 years later in Jackson county. So I was really curious to see if the Stanfords were also went to Florida. Of course I hadn’t been really looking for Stanford’s when I first found the family in Hillsborough county. And when I returned to that census in 1860 in Hillsborough, yeah, there were the Stanfords, they were four households away on the next page of the census. Now that looks like the men were in partnership. So Edmund Jones was always a farmer or a planter, but Daniel Sanford was a physician, but they were both listed on the slave schedules that both 1850 and 1860.

Diana (30m 1s):
And so I suspect that he did the physician thing on the side, but had this plantation that Edmond probably helped him run. Now we’ve got another migration from Jackson county, Mississippi to Hillsborough county, Florida. The men are listed right next to each other on the slave schedules. You know, this is really obvious that this is a family connection and tracing Daniel Stanford back further, he only ever listed one extra female in the household. It looked like Virginia was the only daughter. And I did find him in Georgia and found their marriage in 1828. And Virginia was born in 1829.

Diana (30m 42s):
Everything just lined up beautifully, which is so fun when you finally break through something and then other things line up. But that migration was really key to knowing that this was the right family and that these were Virginia’s parents.

Nicole (30m 56s):
Well, that’s great.

Diana (30m 58s):
I’m still missing one thing though.

Nicole (30m 59s):
What is it?

Diana (31m 0s):
It’s John Jones on a census with the family. How do I know this is really his family? I mean, we’ve got Virginia and, and Edmond as parents, but wouldn’t it be great to find him actually in the household of the,

Nicole (31m 10s):
Yeah, he would have only been a few years old on the 1870 census. So where was he?

Diana (31m 17s):
Right. And the client had looked thoroughly on that census. So I ended up searching, not for him on the census I ended up searching for another person in the family, one of the other sons was named Daniel and that located the family. They had moved up north to Gainesville, Alachua county, Florida. Remember that Gatesville, Texas, that I talked about? Gainesville! Gainesville was the last Florida location that Fannie remembered. So she probably talked about that. And her daughter translated Gainesville, Florida into Gatesville, Florida because she didn’t really know the location.

Diana (31m 58s):
So on that census, Virginia is missing. So Virginia had likely died after the birth of her youngest child who was only four months old. I think the thing that had thrown things off was Edward Jones, who is the ancestor who always went by John Jones, in his later life was listed as Edward Jones. And he’s on the second page of the census. He’s not really connected with the Edmund Jones that’s on the first page. In the indexing they didn’t keep it all together. You had to actually look at the census and realize that this is the same household. We have Edmond Jones, no Virginia, she has died, but then everybody in the household matches 1860 census and Fannie is listed as Louisa here.

Diana (32m 45s):
And when I went back and looked at the obituary, her obituary calls her Frances Louisa Bishop. And so that was exciting to find Fanny, otherwise known as Louisa, in the same household as our Edward who went by John later in life. So we’ve got so many different names that people are going by here. No wonder it was just a brick wall and confusing.

Nicole (33m 7s):
Yes that’s confusing. And I hate that with the indexing and the census records being cut off like that, or the family group gets messed up on the transcription. Was it FamilySearch or Ancestry?

Diana (33m 17s):
I don’t remember because I did use both.

Nicole (33m 20s):
Yeah. That’s really frustrating. I’ve seen that before too, where the family grouping gets either cut in half or someone gets left out or they’ve just grouped the whole entire page together as a family. And it’s just a problem with the fact that it’s a derivative. So of course if it would have been indexed correctly we would have found it. And then the fact that he was listed as Edward, let’s see, 1870, they were still doing the thing where they made three copies of each census. One was for the county, one was for the state and one was sent to the census bureau. It could have been that that one that was sent to the census office in Washington was just copied wrong.

Diana (33m 57s):
Well, I found him on the next census year of 1880 and he was still Edward. He was living with a sister who’d gotten married, because his dad died in 1879. I found some probate for the dad. He had left some land in Hillsborough county and his oldest son was trying to see if he could get that land sold. And so I’m pretty sure it was Edward because the records of John E. Jones had both middle names, Edward and Edmond, which I think just got confused with his dad’s name, but I’m pretty sure he was Edward, just because I found him on two censuses. And it seemed like that was probably more correct.

Nicole (34m 34s):
Wow. I had really just decided in my head that it was John Edward Jones for three generations. I mean, Emund.

Diana (34m 43s):
I know now it will be really interesting if the other generation is theirs, then maybe he was Edward. I don’t know. But in conclusion I was able to prove that Virginia was the daughter of Daniel and Mary Stanford, and that she was the mother of Fannie Jones Bishop and John Edward Jones, and able to find the siblings for John E Jones. And now the client can take that back another generation and keep going with Daniel Stanford in Georgia. So all sorts of great things for future research, but this was a really fun project. And it really was the FAN Club that helped put it all together.

Nicole (35m 20s):
That’s such a good example because even if you didn’t have the sister Fanny, the principles of the FAN Club would have really helped with that one census record showing the family in Florida with the Stanfords in the nearby household. So if you had found that and it was a hypothesized father, and then you had seen the Stanford’s, that would have just been good evidence and then furthering research on the Stanfords probably would have helped to trace the family back in time. And that’s exactly what it did. I mean, you did all of those things, noticing the FAN Club and often we, we will just start putting that in our research log and keeping track of it and noticing the patterns, which is what we’re going to talk about next episode.

Nicole (36m 0s):
So we had a listener question about how do you even track all these people? So we’re going to answer that in our next episode. So thank you for sharing your case study today, and we hope everyone listening enjoyed that. And we will talk to you guys again next week.

Diana (36m 12s):
All right. Bye. Bye everyone.

Nicole (36m 14s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our Research Like a Pro online course or join our next Study Group. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com. To share your progress and ask questions join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our eCourse or Study Group. If you like what you heard and would like to support this podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.