RLP 99: Writing a Narrative Family History – Certification Preparation

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 99: Writing a Narrative Lineage- Certification Preparation. 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 (42s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer co-host of Research Like a Pro, and I’m here with a credited genealogist, Diana Elder. Hi, Diana, how are you?

Diana (56s):
I’m good. Nicole, what have you been working on?

Nicole (1m 0s):
This last week I was working on a client report and I turned it in a couple of days ago. The client wanted to follow his patrilineal line, his surname line, and he had received a report from a cousin, which wasn’t a true report. It was kind of like a compiled family history, but you could tell that the person writing it didn’t have a lot of experience and they had tried to make a link to a Royal family or a Baron in Wales. And so there were some questions the client had about if this was accurate. And so my first step was to review all the data and information the client sent, and right away I saw problems with the connection to the Baron. The first thing I did was tell the client we need to set an objective that is a person that has already been established is proven to be your ancestor.

Nicole (1m 49s):
And then we will take it step by step, back in time. And if we do end up leaking into some Baron, then we will have proven it. But we don’t just want to start with that Baron and go forward because who knows if we’ll even get to anybody in your family.

Diana (2m 4s):
Very wise. I love those kinds of projects. Those are fun.

Nicole (2m 6s):
Yeah. It was interesting. It was just a really short project where I did a survey of the indexed parish registers in the county in England and just kind of showed what the next steps would be. And did a little research plan.

Diana (2m 19s):
Well, this week I’m diving into the Mexico-Texas research with the new client project. So I’m kind of excited about that to be working in a new locality, with a different language, different types of records. It’s always fun to do something a little different. That’ll be kind of an adventure for me this week. Okay, well, let’s get to our review. And this is from listener named Len, and Len says, “I was listening to your podcast on church records today. And you mentioned the difficulty finding Baptist records, mostly church clerks keep the records, but for older records they could possibly be kept at the Southern Baptist convention office in the area or region. Another place I found some early 1800s records was Furman university in Greenville.

Diana (3m 4s):
They have microfilmed early records in their library there. And I was able to find one of my ancestors. I’m really enjoying your podcast, particularly obscure record ideas and DNA information.” So thank you for that, Glen. I agree. Church records, they’re kind of one of those obscure records and that’s a great tip that you never know where you’re going to find them, universities or in the regional convention office. Yeah, I’m reading Sonny Morton’s book and Harold Henderson’s book on church records. And it’s been so interesting if you haven’t checked out their new book on church records, they go through several of the major denominations and really go deep on how to find the records.

Diana (3m 47s):
I’ve been waiting for a book like this for a long time, because often that is the tricky thing. And you can click around on the internet and it’s still difficult to figure out exactly where these records are kept. So I appreciate all the research that went into that book. So what did you think about it, Nicole? Yeah, that was a great resource and it really pointed out the methodology for finding what church your ancestor went to and then the next steps. And they were very similar for each religion: finding the church, locating where the records would be. And that was where it was really helpful because the records were held in all different kinds of places, depending on the religion.

Nicole (4m 23s):
Exactly. All right. Well, today we are doing another episode about Certification Preparation and as many of you know, I am preparing my portfolio to submit to the Board for Certification of Genealogists. So every once in a while, we are doing an episode discussing some of the portfolio elements and some of the standards and rubrics. So today I thought we would talk about Writing a Narrative Family History and the portfolio element that this covers is called the Kinship Determination Project or KDP. And this is portfolio element number six. It used to be number seven, but when they got rid of the second document work element, it became six.

Nicole (5m 3s):
The application guide on BCG’s website says, submit a narrative genealogy narrative lineage, or narrative pedigree that documents and explains linkages among individuals through three ancestral generations, ascending or descending.

Diana (5m 18s):
You know what? This sounds a lot like my four generation project for accreditation. That’s what I had to do was to do the linkages between generations only we had to do four.

Nicole (5m 28s):
Exactly. I think it’s really similar. So the three generations refers to doing three couples and their children. You have to explain the linkages, but the copies of documents are not needed. So did you have to include the copies of the documents?

Diana (5m 42s):
I did, and we had a limit of 40 documents that we can submit. So we had to do 40 of the best documents that showed those linkages.

Nicole (5m 52s):
Interesting. Another aspect of the KDP is that it uses proof statements and proof summaries and optionally proof arguments. And you can use your own family for this. Of course, the only portfolio element that is not your family is the research report and the document that BCG sends to you, but the case study and the KDP are your own family. You can use your own family, but not you or your siblings. So you have to start with somebody other than you, like a parent or a grandparent. What is the requirement for accreditation?

Diana (6m 24s):
You can use your own family also. The starting person has to have been born 80 years before the current date, and they must be deceased, and their spouse must be deceased, and you discuss them in their parents’ household. And then you go back two more generations

Nicole (6m 43s):
Oh, so it’s really the same then. You have three couples and their children.

Diana (6m 48s):
Yeah. When I did it, I ended up doing, I think, four couples, then the starting person. It’s kind of tricky when you’re counting generations for projects like this. So they recently clarified it. So that it’s, that first-generation is the child in the second generation’s household, which I’m so glad for that clarification.

Nicole (7m 6s):
For sure. There was one thing you said I wanted to comment on, for the Kinship Determination Project you are allowed to include living people, but you have to get their permission to be included.

Diana (7m 18s):
Oh, that makes sense.

Nicole (7m 19s):
All right. So let’s talk about the different types of Kinship Determination Projects. Like I mentioned, you can choose either narrative genealogy and narrative lineage or a narrative pedigree. When you read that you might be thinking, well, what is the difference? Luckily, it’s all laid out in Genealogy Standard 72, the standard is called Genealogical Formats and says, as a part of assembled genealogical research results, or as the presentation in its entirety, genealogists have three formatting options for showing family relationships. And then it goes in and defines genealogies, lineages, and pedigrees.

Diana (7m 58s):
You know what I’ve been thinking as you’ve been talking that this is so valuable for anyone trying to put together a book about their family history, this is something that you have to figure out how to organize. You’ve got to figure out how you’re going to show what you’ve been working on. So all of us can do this, whether we’re doing certification or accreditation, you know, we will want to do something like this just for our own personal research.

Nicole (8m 24s):
Exactly. And you probably have a book in your possession that is a family history like this, where it has a number of generations and it shows descent from a couple, or it shows all of the ancestors of a person. So if you have one of those books, you can get it out and look at the numbering and figure out whether it’s a genealogy, a lineage or a pedigree. So let’s go through the definitions. Genealogies show dissent from one person or couple. And this is straight out of genealogies standards, standard 72. At least one generation, in a genealogy highlights more than one couple of a family. And you can use either the NGSQ system or register system for formatting and numbering.

Nicole (9m 8s):
This would be like, including all the descendants of the immigrant ancestor. You would have a lot of different people in each generation, right? This could be a lot of work.

Diana (9m 16s):
It can be. And sometimes those are confusing. I have gotten those from different people who’ve sent me their research and they have it in a format like that. And if they don’t use a good numbering system, you’re paging through and trying to figure out how everybody connects.

Nicole (9m 34s):
Agreed.

Diana (9m 35s):
What is the difference between the NGSQ system or register system?

Nicole (9m 38s):
Well, I will just pop open my book, Numbering Your Genealogy, edited by Elizabeth Shown Mills. And that really explains the basic systems. So let me see if I can find it.

Diana (9m 48s):
So that would be a really good resource for anyone trying to work on something like this. I think I need to get a copy of that book. For the accreditation project we went back, you don’t go forward with showing all the descendants. You start with one couple and go back. So I didn’t have to worry about numbering. It was a little bit different

Nicole (10m 8s):
For this genealogy style if you use the NGSQ system or the register system, they’re pretty similar. They both deal with all known members of one generation before moving to the next. And they use three types of numbers. One to uniquely identify the individual, one to indicate the generation into which that person falls and then another number to denote his or her birth order within the family. So they have different ways of putting all these numbers. Some are super scripted, some are italicized, some are Roman numerals. If you get this book Numbering Your Genealogy published by National Genealogical Society you can see examples, but the NGSQ system is different from Register because it gives a number to each infant, whether or not that child had any children.

Nicole (10m 55s):
I think the Register system doesn’t do that.

Diana (10m 58s):
That’s so interesting.

Nicole (10m 58s):
Right. You really only need to do the numbering If you have more than one couple per generation, because then you need to differentiate who’s who by having the numbers. But if you are doing a lineage, you don’t need to do any numbering at all. A lineage shows dissent for one person or couple or ascent from one person. Lineages highlight only one person, couple or a family in each generation and they need not be numbered.

Diana (11m 25s):
So that’s just simple. You would just say first generation, second generation or something like that if you were doing subtopics,

Nicole (11m 31s):
Right. And I think that’s how you did your four generation report.

Diana (11m 36s):
It is. It is, each section had its own label of which generation it was.

Nicole (11m 41s):
Right. So that is such a good choice for people doing their portfolio because not only is it simpler than a genealogy, you don’t have to have more than one couple in each generation, but you don’t have to do any numbering. So it’s simplified quite a bit. And then the last one is a pedigree. So narrative pedigrees are also acceptable for the KDP and in standard 72, it says, pedigrees show ascent from one person, at least one generation in a pedigree highlights more than one couple or family. Pedigrees use the Sosa-Stradonitz Ahnentafel based numbering system. And that system is also defined and highlighted in the Numbering Your Genealogy book, which is really kind of just a pamphlet it’s really short.

Nicole (12m 24s):
You can just purchase it at NGS on their website, in PDF format if you want to see it and see all the examples, but Sosa-Stradonitz system is what they recommend for that pedigree. So you can just picture your own pedigree if you were going to write a book about all of your ancestors, then you would have to talk about multiple couples in each generation as you go back.

Diana (12m 47s):
And you don’t necessarily have to do all the different couples for each generation, but just more than one couple in one of those generations.

Nicole (12m 56s):
Right?

Diana (12m 56s):
Interesting. So what do most people do?

Nicole (12m 60s):
The lineage. So they just do one line following it back so that you don’t have to do numbering and you don’t have to do a lot of extra generations and extra people. And actually what I’ve noticed from the certification discussion group and talking to people is that they try to find families that didn’t have very many children.

Diana (13m 18s):
That is so wise. For my accreditation my first generation had 10 children. Number two had about seven number, three had 14. It was crazy, but I didn’t have to go into great detail on each one I only had to prove the linkages between the main person. And then I just had to show birth marriage and death for the others. So it wasn’t like it was impossible to do, but I did use every single one of my 40 allotted pages for that project. Do you have a page limit?

Nicole (13m 53s):
There is a page limit overall for the certification portfolio, but each individual element is not limited specifically. So if you have a short research report, you can have a longer KDP. And if your case study is really long, then you’re going to want to limit your KDP. So I was just looking before we started recording at some of the examples from the certification discussion group, and one of them was over 70 pages. And another one was about 50 pages. I think between 40 and 50 pages is about average. It’s definitely the longest element in the portfolio.

Diana (14m 23s):
It’s nice that you have some freedom between the different elements. So are you thinking that you will tend to do a longer KDP or a shorter one, any feelings at this point?

Nicole (14m 35s):
The line that I’ve tentatively chosen for my lineage, there are not very many children in the first and second generation. So that’s going to make it a lot shorter.

Diana (14m 43s):
And that’ll give you more room on some of your other things.

Nicole (14m 47s):
Yes, and I think I will need extra space for my case study because the one that I would like to use incorporates DNA, and whenever you incorporate DNA that introduces so much more information and data.

Diana (14m 59s):
Yeah. That makes everything almost twice as long, because you’re doing all your traditional research and then you have to add in all the DNA. I always just plan on them being about twice as long as regular reporting.

Nicole (15m 13s):
Yes. So those are the three types of genealogical formats that you can choose for the kinship determination, genealogies, lineages, and pedigrees. And like we said, most people do the lineage because it’s the easiest and the shortest. Now let’s talk about what the Kinship Determination Project really shows your ability to do. And one of the things it does is it shows your ability to write a narrative. If your family history book that you’re looking at to see an example of numbering does not have paragraphs and essay format, then that’s not a narrative genealogy that would just be a numbered genealogy. One of the books that I’m looking at is one that doesn’t have a lot of narrative.

Nicole (15m 53s):
It just has a short paragraph at the beginning or end of each chapter. And then it kind of looks like an outline format where people are numbered and it doesn’t even have a paragraph under each person. It just has their name. And then the footnotes have dates and things. This is what you’ll often see with these family history books where they’re showing all the descendants of a person, because part of it is that it’s so much work. And another part of it is that most people are not certified. Genealogists are trained and know how to do the narrative family history and the numbering the way that Genealogy Standards recommends.

Diana (16m 28s):
Right. I think they’re just trying to show their work. They’ve worked on tracing all these generations. They just want to get it into a book and there’s not enough room because back in the day you had to pay for publishing so many copies. You know, maybe you do a run of 200 copies and you really were just going to sell it to your family. Then every page costs money. However, I have seen some really large family history books like that. When you look at a book like that, I just look at it as clues to the family, realizing that not all the information might be accurate because often they’re not sourced. They just give you the dates. And then that gives you a clue that somewhere there was something that used that date, whether it was a family Bible or headstone or something.

Diana (17m 16s):
So I just look at those as the beginning of research, trying to verify all those different types of information in them.

Nicole (17m 24s):
Yes. So a book like that, or a project like that, where you just have numbered individuals without paragraphs about them, that would not be adequate to write a narrative lineage or genealogy or pedigree, you’ll want to include biographical information. And in Genealogy Standards, it gives us standard about this, standard 73, and it says genealogies, pedigrees, lineages, and most other genealogical writing include descriptive biographical narrative besides vital statistics. These details include sufficient information about each person’s or family’s activities, residences, circumstances, contributions, and lifestyle, to identify that uniquely within the context of their historical era society and geographic place.

Diana (18m 12s):
Wow. That’s a great description. And I try to do that with my research reports for my clients, because I think that they want to know about their ancestors and where they fit in the context of the society they were living in. I think that’s really fun. Contributions is kind of a fun topic thinking about how they might’ve contributed to their society or through their occupation.

Nicole (18m 34s):
Yeah.

Diana (18m 34s):
That’s really interesting

Nicole (18m 36s):
That reminds me of a blog post that we did about some of our female ancestors and their public service for women’s history month, a couple of years ago, it was really fun.

Diana (18m 44s):
That’s right. I kind of forgot about that. I wrote about my grandmother and her service in the War Mothers during World War II, and then the daughters, the Utah pioneers. That was so fun to read about that because we often just see grandma, we don’t realize that she was out there doing stuff. I think that’s so neat to research that as well.

Nicole (19m 5s):
Yes. I think that’s really what we want to read. When we’re given a book about our family history. We want to have all of these details about their lives beyond the names and dates.

Diana (19m 13s):
That’s going to be so fun to have you research our family. I’m so thrilled you’re doing this and then I can just enjoy it.

Nicole (19m 21s):
I’ll be so thrilled when it’s done and I could enjoy being a certified genealogist. Oh, so Judy Russell has a webinar that’s free to watch on Legacy Family Tree Webinars called Kinship Determination from Generation to Generation. And she gave this in 2014. So you should go watch that. It’s a great introduction to the KDP. She mentions in there that you can’t just submit family group charts and non-narrative genealogies and you need to have narrative that talks about the context and all of that. So let’s talk now about the proof summary aspect of the KDP. The application guide says that you need to have a documented proof statement, proof, summary, or prove argument as appropriate to establish each relationship.

Nicole (20m 11s):
You need to include proof arguments, or summaries justifying your kinship conclusions for at least two parent-child relationships in different generations. So if everyone in your lineage that you want to do can easily be documented with just a simple proof statement, then that’s not going to work. For the KDP you need to have at least two proof summaries. You could have an argument in there too, but you don’t need a proof argument, you can just have at least two proof summaries.

Diana (20m 38s):
Okay. So we better talk a little bit about what the differences between those. So if we have a proof statement, that means that something was just really easy to prove, right?

Nicole (20m 50s):
Right. It’s basically just a sentence that gives information that states an acceptable conclusion and it contains documentation that demonstrates the research scope sufficient to support the statement’s accuracy. This definition comes from the glossary of Genealogy Standards. And you can have more than one source citation in the footnote for that sentence. And often you will because we need two independent source citations that agree for it to be a proof statement. If you have conflicting information, then you’ll need to make a proof summary or proof argument. So to have a proof statement, you’ll just have high-quality evidence information, probably from a primary informant who was an eyewitness or direct evidence from original sources that all agree.

Nicole (21m 36s):
And you can just write one sentence. It says so-and-so was the son of so-and-so and then footnote, ‘k here’s the death certificate and the birth certificate. Done.

Diana (21m 47s):
Unless they don’t agree, right? And then you have to go into more detail.

Nicole (21m 51s):
Right. So if you can’t do it in one statement, then you need to go to the next one, which is a proof summary. And a proof summary is, more like a paragraph, or it could be longer, but it’s a narrative or a list, stating facts that support or lead to an acceptable conclusion and it can be standalone, or it can be within a chapter or a family history or other work. So a proof summary as kind of like a list of facts that all support your conclusion. And then to get a proof argument, this is quite a bit longer. Typically a proof argument is an answer to a complex genealogical problem. So you have a conclusion that you’ve documented explaining it through multiple paragraphs and it can appear as a standalone product, like the articles in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, or it can appear within a chapter or a family history or other work.

Diana (22m 45s):
Right. That was my third generation for my project. It was set in Georgia in the early 1800s. And it was so complex that it took several pages that probably it’s one of my longer sections, that one took several pages to try to prove it through a variety of obscure records. I think I use the tax lists, a newspaper, and notice, the land record, court record, you know, all of those types of things that we have to use when we get way back. And there’s nothing that specifically shows this person being the father of the person we’re trying to prove. So I would guess you’re probably going to be using a proof argument in your KDP, or are you going to have all proof summaries?

Nicole (23m 26s):
Right now I’m not sure. I need to really dive in. I’ve just been working on the first generation and gathering up the birth, marriage and death certificates for that. So far, it looks like I probably won’t have a proof argument, but as I get working, I might discover that I do need to develop a proof argument. So we’ll see.

Diana (23m 45s):
They’re kind of fun to do quite honestly, I really liked proof arguments because it’s how you put something together that nobody else has been able to figure out or prove because you can’t just say, well, this record shows the father’s such and such. And so I just really enjoy doing those. And that’s a lot of what I do is doing all this tricky research and then writing it up in a way to prove something, right. They’re very fun.

Nicole (24m 9s):
Yes. And I will get the chance to show that on the case study. And that’s really all about a proof argument and building a case with indirect evidence and showing that you can do a difficult problem.

Diana (24m 21s):
So that’s why you don’t necessarily have to show it in your KDP because you’d have a different element of the portfolio. That’s really showing that skill. Okay.

Nicole (24m 31s):
Exactly. So for each proof, you must conform to all the standards for reasoning, from evidence and standards for proofs. And if you’re using DNA, then the DNA evidence standards. So that covers all the genealogy standards from 37 to 70. Basically this KDP is really a great chance for you to show that you can accurately explain family relationships so that you can do proof statements and summaries. And just really show that you’re able to do genealogical writing.

Diana (25m 1s):
Kind of gives you a chance to shine. When I was doing ProGen, one of our assignments was to do a narrative and it was really fun reading through all of our classmates narratives and seeing how interesting it was. They would include pictures and newspaper articles. And a lot of them did just their parents and grandparents. It was so fun. I think it just brings so much flavor to family history. So writing a narrative is probably one of the best skills for genealogists to learn how to do, because it’s how you’re going to entice the younger generation to read your, your family history writing. You know, nobody wants to have this, a boring set of dates and places.

Diana (25m 41s):
They want to have the interesting stories. And that’s what you’re looking for in this KDP I think trying to make this something that’s really interesting to someone else. Okay.

Nicole (25m 54s):
Agreed. Let’s just talk about what the application guide says. The project should demonstrate, we won’t go over everything in the rubrics, but make sure that if you are doing certification, you study the rubrics because that’s how the judges will grade your project. So then you can practice judging your own work. The Kinship Determination Project should demonstrate broad research. So we need to show that we can do research beyond the basic birth and death certificates and census records and accurate placement of each person in the family. Also biographical information for each couple. And you know, when I read this, I thought to myself that is helpful to distinguish that it’s only for each couple and you don’t really have to go into biographical information for each child.

Diana (26m 36s):
Yeah. That narrows it down a little bit.

Nicole (26m 39s):
But we do need to prove each parent-child relationship, but we don’t have to give all of the biographical background and history for each child. Then we also need to do documentation of each statement. Of fact, that is not common knowledge. And as genealogists, we know that we need to do that. So anytime we make a statement, we need to have a citation for that. And then the names and vital data of children of each couple and then a clear format and the appropriate style. So those are the main things that we’re looking to show that we know how to do in the Kinship Determination Project. So I’m excited to write this. Like I said, I’ve been gathering up the documents I need for my first generation. And I was looking at some of the examples from the certification discussion group and I noticed that people include photos and maps and all kinds of tables.

Nicole (27m 27s):
And it’s just, it’s a fun writing project.

Diana (27m 29s):
That’s great. I think it’s going to be really interesting to see what additional information you can find. Because when we first started doing our research, we would just use some of the basic types of records and we never really got into different things will be fun to see what other information you can find about these different couples.

Nicole (27m 50s):
Yes, it will. Well, thank you everybody for listening today. We hope you have a great day. And we just wanted to let you know that we have a fun episode coming up next week. It’s going to be episode number 100 of Research Like a Pro. So we’re going to be talking about some of our top tips for how to Research Like a Pro and have a fun time discussing the Research Like a Pro process.

Diana (28m 11s):
Yes, we have come a long way since we began. You know, we’ve done a bunch more research, a lot of teaching on the method and we have to some really good tips that seem to be common questions. So we’re going to address some of those and give you some additional helps as you try to follow the process.

Nicole (28m 29s):
All right, everyone have a great week and we will talk to you again next week. Bye bye.

Diana (28m 36s):
Bye bye everyone.

Nicole (28m 34s):
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.