Map Out the Places You Know

When we “think we know” everything, we can overlook more things than we realize. I was several years into my research until I realized how close my mother lived to her maternal grandparents. I knew where the farms were located for all her grandparents, and had a verbal description of where Mom lived (on a rental farm), but I had never mapped them all out–even the approximate area–until I had been researching for some time.

Being familiar with things can occasionally cause us to overlook things–and that’s not just true with locations on a map.