Range 14 East 6th PM Index

Have you ever had trouble documenting a father/son relationship? Or, have you had trouble separating records for men of the same name? My go to source in these situations has been the land records.

In Kansas, we are lucky in that most counties maintain what is called the Range Index. Basically, this is an index of the land transactions for the range. What is nice about this index is that each quarter section has its own page. Thus, it is easy to see how land was transferred over time.

Last August, I was able to travel to Woodson County, Kansas to track down a court case and to obtain copies of the land records for my Mentzer, Wells, and Ricketts families. Below is a transcription of the information found in the index for Range 14.

Woodson County, Kansas
Range 14 Index

Never Finished Pt 2

A comment was made on me previous post about sourcing. I totally agree that if I only count well-documented ancestors, then my % decreases drastically. I recently discovered the ability of the Fan Chart on the Family Search tree to display status of sourcing.

Never Finished

Last May, we started a home improvement project to replace broken and damaged concrete. Since the concrete was under our screened-in-porch, the project included tearing down our the screened-in-porch and replacing it with a room addition. The project quickly expanded to include new siding and windows. In July, I jokingly commented to our contractor that I just wanted to be done by Christmas.

Well, the tree is up, and we aren't finished yet. Unfortunately, they ran out of siding. We are on the list for new guttering, but the weather is affecting that contractor's ability to work. Thus, our remodel project is still a work in progress -- a lot like my genealogy projects.

Today, someone tweeted Crista Cowan's 2012 blog post, Family History All Done? What's Your Number? Curious, I decided to 'calculate' my number.

Now, when people question why I'm not finished, I can honestly say:

I've only discovered 39% of my ancestors back 10 generations!

What's Your Number?

Jackpot

About a month ago, I ran across another Thompson tree on Ancestry.com that had an article from the Belleville newspaper attached to Ulysses Grant Thompson.

Curious as to what was in the newspaper, I decided to do a search for Grant Thompson in the Belleville, Kansas newspapers on Newspapers.com.

Instead of backing up a step and doing a more focused search, I opened many of the articles in new tabs. Thus, I had a browser open with who knows how many tabs.

I not only found an obituary for Ulysses Grant Thompson, but also for his wives.

In addition, I found news items related  Grant Thompson's siblings and his children.

This newspaper search took quite a few hours (days) to complete. However, the information contained in all of these articles was genealogy GOLD.

I hit the JACKPOT!

Bearded - Not!

A recent #52Ancestors prompt was bearded. In thinking about that prompt, my first thought was I don't have anyone to right about since the majority of pictures I have are of men without beards. So instead of writing about someone who was bearded, I'm going to show my unbearded family tree.

My Family Tree

Parents

Eugene David Crawford and Roberta Adell Briles

Issues Searching Trees

Do you wish that everyone who took a DNA test had a tree attached going back to at least their grandparents? Do you ever search public member trees hoping to find a cousin with the family Bible or family photographs? I have a lot of family photographs, documents and even a Bible that I want to share with family members. I have a public member tree and I want others to be able to find my tree.

As I discovered yesterday, the vast majority of my tree may now be found. However, there are parts of my tree that still aren't indexed. Randy Seaver reminded me of this possibility in his reply to my comment on his blog, Has Ancestry.com Indexed Ancestry Member Trees Yet. It appears that the entire tree isn't indexed. Instead only individuals with Ancestry.com sources are indexed.

In order to verify this, I had to go to a section of my tree where I had not worked the Ancestry hints. I selected the John Minnick family to test this theory. My Heartland Genealogy tree contains Ancestry sources for John Minnick.