These are the notes I took from the lesson.
Goals for Finding Females in your Family Tree
- Identify her given and maiden names
- Place her in the correct birth family
- Prserve her story and her place in your family tree
- Pose a research question (Who were Eleanlor Cline's parents?)
- Consider research strategies
- Gather and evaluate evidence
- Answer the question (John Fairfield and Sarah Kirby)
- Information that answers a genealogical question explicitly
- Information that appears to be relevant to a genealogy question but needs to be combined with other information before an answer can be formulated.
- Reframe the question
- From: Who were Eleanor Cline's parents?
- To: Who could have been Eleanor Cline's parents?
- When direct evidence doesn't exist, refocus and look for indirect evidence
- Who could have been Eleanor's parents?
- Eleanor's oldes son was named Fairfield
- Obit for James Fairfield mentions his parents, John and Sarah Fairfield, and his sister, Mrs. Cline
- John Fairfield and Sarah Kirby married in 1856
- 1860 census lists son, James
- 1863 probate case for John Fairfield mentions two, unamed minor orphans
- Idea that ancestors did not live in a vacum, but in a cluster of relatives, neighbors, friends, and associates
- What are vital records?
- Work in reverse order - marriage might be the easiest
- Record every clue and every source
- Death certificates, church death records, town death registers, internment and cemetery records, obituaries
- Marriage certificate, marriage register (religious or civil), newspaper announcements
- Birth Certificate, baptismal records, newspaper announcements
- Where?
- Ancestry.com
- Center for Disease Control and Prevention
- No maiden name
- No parent family
- No known name
- Map out her family cluster
- Who where her relatives
- She was..
- a daughter
- a granddaughter
- Was she
- a wife or widow?
- mother or mother-in-law?
- sister or sister-in-law?
- grandmother or aunt?
- Who could have been her parents or grandparents?
- Examine older people living nearby
- Examine people buried nearby
- Notice names of sons and daughters
- Named in wills and probate cases
- Named in deed records
- Named in obituaries
- Census Records
- Federal, state, 1890 Special Veteran's census
- Deeds
- Military records - pensions
- City directories
- Who is a potential mother?
- Notice all of the women
- Court records
- Estate Sales
- Military records
- Examine all possible children
- Obituaries
- Consider every possible role she played in the family
- Focus on the men in her life
- Don't limit research to your line
- Put together all clues to build an indirect evidence case
- Was she
- a citizen?
- Court records - civil and criminal; divorce
- community resident?
- diaries and letters written by others
- newspapers
- church member?
- membership rolls
- minutes
- confirmations
- consumer?
- store ledgers
- Employee?
- business records
- club member?
- membership rolls
- meeting minutes
- student?
- yearbooks
- Focus on location
- what records are available where she was know to have lived?
- Focus on opportunity
- What was available to her?
- Focus on circumstances
- What events occured in her lifetime?
- Names
- nicknames
- middle initial - sometimes the middle name was used interchangebly with the first name
- name at the time of marraige is not always the maiden name (previous marriages)
- names of her children
- Reliability of the informant
- Don't assume accuracy
- Read case studies
- National Genealogical Society Quarterly
- New England Historical and Genealogical Register
