Writing up your research is always advised, even if only for yourself. It can strengthen your conclusions and help you see gaps. Creating citations (even if they are not perfect and aren’t punctuated “correctly”) gets you thinking about how the record you used was created and how it was accessed. My how-to newsletter Casefile Clues contains written up analysis of individual records and families. It’s probably more than a person typically needs to do for each record, but the goal is to get readers thinking about each document they acquire, what it means, what it doesn’t, where to go next, etc.
Don’t assume that your immigrating ancestor didn’t stop somewhere along the way to where he finally settled. Just because your immigrant lived the last fifty years of his life in one place does not mean that’s the only place he lived after he immigrated. One of my families stopped for about ten years in Kentucky before finally settling in Illinois. Another family spent a few years in Cincinnati, Ohio, before heading further west. Those short-term stops matter. Your relative could have married there, had children there, purchased property there, etc. And those things generate records.
I’m helping a work colleague with Native American ancestry. The person of interest was actually born on a reservation in New Mexico in the 1930s, had parents and grandparents who were also Native American and lived in the southwest and Michigan. It’s not something with which I’m familiar, but learning about new things to help my colleague has given me a few ideas for my own research.
There has never been a better time to subscribe to Casefile Clues, my how-to newsletter packed with research approaches and analysis. Written in a down-to-earth and engaging fashion, we cover a variety of topics, sources, methods, and research problems. Visit our site where you can subscribe today for only $20 for 52 issues. Newsletters are delivered as attached PDF files to an email. Subscribe today.
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