Heartland Genealogy

One of this week's 'Finally Get Organized' tasks involved sources, information and evidence. Ever since making the transition from PAF to The Master Genealogist, I've been working with sources. Although many of my source citations pre-date Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills, I have tried to document each piece of information tied to the individuals in my database. I may also have written a ' genealogical proof argument ' during the early days of my research when I wrote the post, ' Untangling the James Crawfords '. Even though I believe what I wrote about the various James Crawford families is accurate, I doubt it would stand up to today's standards. Thus, when challenged to look at sources, information and evidence this week, I took that as a challenge to improve my skills in hopes of bringing them up to the levels of today's genealogical standards. With that in mind, I elected to investigate a place instead of a person. The pla...

This week I've been transcribing the audio from one of the interviews I did with my father who passed away almost ten years ago. As I was marveling at the family stories contained in one recording I realized that I owed a BIG THANK YOU to two people: Thomas MacEntee and Pat Richley-Erickson ( Dear Myrtle ). Without them I would be doing sometimes genealogy and never going back thru what I already had. Genealogy Do-Over on Facebook . I 'officially' started the do-over in July claiming I was doing a go-over. However, I spent most of my time taking advantage of all of the prompts, resources and tools to re-connect with the genealogy world and bring my skills up to current standards. Unfortunately, I'm still not consistent about using a research log -- even though that was a skill I learned in the early days of my research and I have my original log to prove it. That changed last spring when I discovered the The Genealogy Do-Over provided a chance to rediscover...