Hooray for Wild Cards!

 It's been awhile since I posted. I've been busily working on my genealogy with Zotero and Trello as my companions. I'll post more about those another time, but today I want to talk about wild cards. What is a wild card, you ask? Simply put, it is doing a search with an asterisk substituted for a letter or group of letters. This is useful when you aren't sure of the exact spelling of a name. For example, I have seen my Janco surname spelled alternately as Janko, Jansgo, and even Jansco. Rather than search for these individually, I could use a wild card to search for the name 'Ja*o'.

And that is exactly what I did early today. I've been searching for some time for my Paul Janco in ship manifests with no luck, even using creative spellings of the name. I knew that he was already in the US when the rest of his family arrived in 1911. Recently I found him in census records (another story!) and learned that he arrived in 1907. I did a quick search for him on Family Search, again with no luck! So I decided to try a wild card search.

First I narrowed my search. I knew that he family had arrived through the Port of Baltimore, and thought there was a good chance that he would have traveled through the same port before sending for his family. I knew I could widen the search to other ports if necessary, so I restricted my search to Baltimore Passenger Records. I typed 'Ja*o' into the surname box, but I knew that I'd searched for Paul Janco and Paul Jansco with no luck earlier. So on a hunch, I also used a wild card for the first name, typing in 'P*l'. I knew he was born about 1865, so I restricted the birth years from 1860-1870. I hit search and BOOM! — there it was! Along with yet another spelling — JANCSO.

Pal Jansco Maryland, Baltimore Passenger Lists, 1820-1948

From other information on the ship manifest, I can see that Paul is traveling to St. Louis to join George Kovacs. There is something written in front of Georg that I can't make out. I can also see that this is not the first time that Paul has entered the US. In 1904, he arrived in the US with a destination of Akron, Ohio.
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​You can see the full image here.

Genealogy Tips: Citing Your Sources

 After choosing a genealogy app to record your data and finding some data to work with, the next thing you should do is learn how to cite your sources! A family tree without source citations is meaningless and should not be trusted. As my college prep English teacher stated many years ago “When you write your research paper, I don’t care if you tell me the sky is green with purple polkadots, as long as you provide three independent sources for that information in your footnotes.” Even if the tree seems well-sourced, nothing should be accepted as fact unless you’ve retraced the research done.

I’ve managed to avoid the common newbie mistake of just entering information without checking the source and I’ve always included at least rudimentary citations. Unfortunately, as I’ve become more experienced, I’ve learned that these rudimentary citations are often not good enough. Basically, your source citation should include enough information to allow you to retrace your steps in your research, and allow another researcher to retrace your steps and verify your information.

There are several guides for citing sources. The ‘gold standard’ is Elizabeth Shown Mills ‘Evidence Explained’. This 885-page book gives examples for citing almost any type of source you can imagine, and if it isn’t in there, you can always visit the Facebook page and ask for advice. To be honest, though, I consider this overkill for anyone who is not a professional genealogist preparing reports for a client or a genealogist who hopes to publish her research professionally some day. It is complicated and cumbersome, and somewhat intimidating, meaning I am less likely to cite more sources if I try to use this as a guide. I always feel like I am creating them the wrong way, to why bother?!

Other genealogists prefer a more simplified approach to source citation. Ben Sayer’s Practical Citation uses this approach. You can also use other approaches including the Chicago style method of citation, the MLA style, etc. Your genealogy software will probably have some citation templates built in. Mine does, but I still find it necessary to modify the template to meet my needs. You may also choose to use a companion app that organizes your sources outside of your genealogy database, like Evidentia, or even a spreadsheet. The St. Louis Genealogical Society has a handout with templates for the most commonly used types of sources. These follow the Evidence Explained model of citing sources.

Unless you plan to publish professionally, my advice is to just  do whatever works for YOU, but make sure you do SOMETHING to cite your sources! Using a birthdate for your grandma’s sister because your grandma told you so is fine, as long as you include a citation saying the information came from a conversation with Grandma and giving an approximate date for the conversation. The important thing is that when someone asks you how you know grandma was born in 1937, you can tell them where you found that information. They can then decide if this is a reliable source or if they need to do more digging!

Genealogy Tips: Choosing Your Genealogy Software

This weekend I was working with a friend who is relatively new to genealogy. I decided to type of a few hints for her based on my experience with genealogy over the past 15+ years. Then it occurred to me that others may find this interesting. So today I am starting a new series on my blog.
Disclaimer: These hints are all my opinion based on my experiences. What works best for me may not be what is best for you! Read these for information and opinion, but when you make choices, do what feels right to you! And if you have advice, please feel free to leave a comment. Genealogy works best when we all share and learn from each other!

You can build a family tree online many places, but most experienced genealogists recommend that you build your family tree in a database on your own computer and then export a gedcom file to be imported to one or more online sites that let you build a family tree. (I will be discussing these sites in a coming post) There are many reasons for keeping your tree on your own computer. Here are a couple.

• Some sites let anyone make changes to the family tree so if someone who is not as meticulous in their research as you are comes to a different conclusion, they can also your family structure!
• Online site have been know to be sold or go out of business. If the site disappears and your only copy of your tree is on the site, all of your hours of research is lost! If the site is instead sold to another company, the new company may require a subscription for you to access your data.
• Online site have been know tor crash. Just like when a company goes out of business, you may lose access to your tree and all of your hard work.

There are many family tree programs available. Some are Windows only and some are Mac only. All offer free versions or trial versions that allow you to try the program out and upgrade to a paid version later if you like it. Here are some of the most popular.

• Reunion - this is Mac only and the one I’ve be using for over a decade! There is also a companion app, ReunionTouch, for your iPhone that lets you sync over dropbox so you can make changes on the go
• Legacy - this is Windows only. There is a free version and a paid version. Click on the download link to see the differences. Most beginning genealogist will probably not need anything more than the free version gives you, but you may well want to upgrade as you become more experienced!
• Family Tree Builder from My Heritage - this is a free program for building a family tree. I have not used it, so I’m not sure how much functionality there is without a My Heritage subscription. There is also a companion My Heritage mobile app for both iOS and Android, but again, I do not know if it is dependent on a subscription to My Heritage.
• Roots Magic - There is a free version, Roots Magic Essentials, which is probably all a beginning genealogist needs. Again, you may want to upgrade to the paid version as you gain experience. Click on the ‘Features’ link to see the differences. There is a companion app for your mobile devices, however, at least in the case of the iOS app, it has not been updated in almost 18 months. I suspect it may be one of the apps that will not work on the iPhone after the next iOS update in the fall.
• Heredis - I just discovered this one and I’m impressed. I probably won’t switch because I’ve been using Reunion forever, and I’m used to the way it works, but I’d give it serious consideration if I was just starting out. I particularly like that there is a mobile app and it looks good! You can sync with the desktop apparently, but can also use it as a stand-alone or import a gedcom from your software — which I’ve already done! It looks great on my iPad!

Some things people like to consider when making a choice

• Price
• Features available
• Syncing with Ancestry (not something I find useful or smart, but you might)
• Mobile app companion and ability to sync your tree on all of your devices. (through the cloud, over your network, through gedcom import, etc)
• Access to support (Reunion has a message board with participation by both users and developers who jump in to answer questions and offer)
• How frequent are the updates
• Are there built in search abilities (these allow you to search Ancestry and other sites directly from your database
• Report & Chart generation -
• Source templates - this is VERY important and one of the things you need to commit to doing right from the beginning! 

The best way to make your decision is to download the free version of a couple of different apps and decide which works best for you.

Source Tracker

I discovered a 'new-to-me' blog this week and it inspired me. The blog is Organize Your Family History by Janine Adams, and the post that inspired me was Tracking Progress. One of the things I've struggled with through the years is finding an easy way to see what documents I've collected on a person and what I still need to find. So when I saw Janice's 'Progress Tracker' I was intrigued. Like Janice, I use Reunion for Mac for my family history data and Apple's Numbers for my spreadsheets, so I was easy to adapt her idea for my needs.

Actually, 'easy' may be overstating things a bit because it did take me awhile to set this up, but a lot of that was due to my poor genealogy habits. It was relatively easy to export my list of names from Reunion and import them into Numbers, but the bigger problem was my inconsistency in how I name people. When I have found a married woman whose name I do not know i've used 'Unknown Unknown', "UNK UNKNOWN', '??? Unknown', '???? ????', and Mrs. Unknown. So I decided to standardize how I enter 'unknown' people and that alone took me 4 days!

I also made a few minor changes to my spreadsheet. 

• I made separate columns for my first and middle names and my surnames, as well as separate columns for the year of birth and the year of death. That allows me to sort by any of these attributes.
   
• But the biggest change a made is an addition of a 'Family Branch' column. Reunion uses 'flags' to mark attributes like 'military service', 'unproved relationship', etc. I've created a flag for each of my major lines. This allows me to quickly see what branch a person belongs to, as well as quickly find everyone belonging to that branch. So it made sense to me to add that possibility into my spreadsheet.  

Once I got this set up, I saved this as my 'Master Sheet' so I don't have to do it again. Then I duplicated the sheet and labeled it US Census. I added census years across the top, and used Janice's color coding method to figure out where I am.

Here is an excerpt of my 'in progress' Census sheet.

I haven't actually entered any census tracking into this yet, but already it has been worthwhile! I am using dark gray to indicate that a person was not living at the time a census was taken and light green to indicate that he was alive at this time. The light gray indicates that I do not know the person's status that year. It is very easy to see very clearly when I need to do some more research to determine birth and death dates!

There are a few modifications I am thinking of making as I start my tracking.

• I may add a 'check box' to the green spaces to check off when I've found the census record. (Janice uses a different color.)
• I may add a new color to indicate a person was alive but will not appear in the census, usually because they were not living in the US at the time. This will be especially applicable to my PETRINI line who immigrated to the US relatively recently and many of the ancestors never left Italy. This will be a quick visual to remind me to look for Italian records (or German or Dutch, etc.)
• I may bold or italicize names to indicate direct family and other important people. I tend to add a lot of extended family to may database, just 'in case' they are related; people like my great-grandfather's brother's 2nd wife's mother's sister-in-law's sister's children. I don't really need to gather all there census data unless it later becomes apparent that they are related more closely. I'll have to play around with this a little.
  

After I get my census data tracked, I will move on to adapting Janice's spreadsheet to track BMD documents, but I'll save that for another day.

So what do you think? Would you find something like this useful? Do you have a method that works better for you?

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This post first appeared on my Weebly blog, Family Trees and Branches, 8 Jul 2016