2012 Genealogy Goals

Careful genealogists: let's work together for 2012 goals to publish the 20 hard questions associated with each line. Please contribute and help move the work along on your families.

Label your comment with the family name and date. Please share the sticking points you are sure of that we can work to solve. Let's don't be well meaning researchers repeating work over and over. A good place to start if you don't already have a list of questions is to check out the Rootsweb L-list which covers the last name you are researching. You should find conversations about people you are researching and you can pick up the original immigrant etc. This is an example for the Stanley family of a place to find questions on your lines. http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/index

One of my lines, the "Hightowers" has the information already pulled out. It included the names of the original immigrants who were believed to be brothers. This has been disproven by thorough DNA projects associated with the name. The fathers of the first immigrants have also not been identified. Last names for females that have come to be passed on as fact and are dis-proven would be nice to know about. Sometimes the person who first used the last name to test out a theory is discovered and is shocked to find out how this trial name has come to be known as fact and is repeated in every media known to genealogy. Thank you, Rhonda Wall

Blanchard Family Questions

I am starting a long term project of compiling the most common Blanchard Family questions associated with my line of Blanchards which I believe to be from Thomas Blanchard (http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~blanch-l/thomjosb.html#I2). I expect around 20 solid questions to develop. the first question comes from: http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~blanch-l/thomjosb.html

The Blanchards seem to stem from two men Thomas and Joseph Blanchard from 1590ish from Clatford, Hants, ENG, who are often put together as brothers although there is no evidence to support that.

1. Are Joseph and Thomas Blanchard who were immigrants from Clatford, Hants, ENG England brothers in the late 1500 and who immigrated to the US to MA?

We are really moving into the 21st century in family history work. We are not quite there yet though. Paf 5 is out the door. Yes we can now do our genealogy mostly paperless. I go the genealogy library at BYU and people are not carrying huge bags and briefcases of information anymore. They use a flashdrive. Go to www.newegg.com and find a 32GB flashdrive that is 3.0. You take this baby to the library and it backs up your files on your own working file. It should last about 3 years they tell me. How do you keep all of your databases updated? You can’t keep a working file like you need that interfaces with Ancestry.com and Familysearch.org. without buying a 3rd party program. I am experimenting with Ancestral Quest right now. We’ll see. I have already dismissed several programs.

Sad news, right now you can’t really use familysearch.org because LDS engineers are tweeking it and preparing it for release to the general public. I am just cleaning up records as fast as I can mostly using new.familysearch.org. - which we will be saying goodbye to shortly. Contact me privately for tips on how to do this if you don’t know how.

Another thing to do while waiting for the exciting new site to be fully functional is to go to http://www.treeseek.com/. I have made several 2ft. X3ft. posters of both my mother’s and my father’s 9 generation family trees. Each tree cost me $7.00. I hope you can find a cheap place to print these. I used the BYU Genealogy Library. I want my 9 generation to be finished, meaning filled out and documented. It is wonderful not to have all this paper floating around but really how do you get a view of what is going on to the 9th generation without a map? That’s what these posters are for. I have caught huge errors, noticed that first cousins have married, generations swapped, parents used as children or grandparents and so forth. It is alarming when you see huge gaping holes staring right at you. Another thing I have used the chart for is finding out the extensions that have been done by other genealogists in Ancestry.com. I just make sure the work is well documented and print out the end of line people with the new chart and hand write the names and dates in. I don’t miss a person this way. With the ways you are and you are not allowed to bring in small gedcoms to your databases, this is how I deal with it at the moment. I'm hoping with Ancestral Quest, I won't have to do that anymore. I also make sure that every document available is connected with the proper ancestor. Cruise through other's work on Ancestry.com and check out the stories they have written. I can also find a few in a google search. Who knows about these stories. You won't know until you check them out. We are putting stories up here for good or ill. Help if you can.

Any questions, or do I have something wrong? Let me know!!

rbwall@gmail.com