Deciding between 2 alternatives: tips anyone?

[ThrelfallYorky]

... and enjoy the chase! Welcome, you'll find brilliant help from real experts on here!

[Mike Morrell (NL)]

You might also find a link to the family by the names of the witnesses,often a married sister or sister/brother in law.And of course the address on a marriage cert might well be where the family were on the previous or next census.

If you find the married couple with children on later censuses,sometimes an elderly rellie is living/staying with them and that could help too.

Good tip! Thanks, Carol
Mike

[panda40]

Have you tried looking on family search for your individuals to see if there is a baptism for them. The information needs to be verified with actual parish records as sometimes the information is not always 100% accurate. If you let us know the name and places of the individuals we can help with the search.
Regards panda

[Mike Morrell (NL)]

In this game, Mike, you have to make use of whatever scraps of information you can find, however slight, and wherever you come by them.

A good system of storage and retrieval of reference material, and a good index to that system, are an absolute must if you are going to try to go back more than a couple of generations. What seems irrelevant now may suddenly seem critically important later on.

So, tedious though it may seem, always note everything you find, including witnesses to marriages, whether they signed or made their mark (somebody who signed in 1815 is unlikely to be the same person as the person of the same name who made his mark in 1819, no matter how strongly all the other evidence may appear to suggest that they are), names of informants at death ... everything. At the time of finding he information, you cannot be certain what is vital, what is peripheral, and what is irrelevant information. So treat it all as critical. Record it all, file it all, index it all, cross-reference it all ...

Wise words, jbml, thanks for these! I use Ancestry.com online and Ancestry's Family Tree maker offline as my repositories for data and relationships. I like the ease of the 'tree view' and the navigation. The endless 'hints' are an annoying distraction! A limitation of Ancestry is perhaps that it's not always easy to make all the 'image data' (census, BMD, etc.) visible if it's not already in the transcript. Or maybe I just need to learn to do this better. If you have any tips on alternative or supplementary tools for keeping records, I'd be interested to read them.

Regards,

Mike

[jbml]

Good old fashioned Word documents.

I have a document for each generation, with a narrative account for each ancestor I have identified, with all sources footnoted.

If I have any doubts, I note them. If I am unsure, I say "possibly ...".

All new information is carefully recorded against ALL the ancestors it affects, and their narrative adjusted accordingly.

I keep a separate document which is an index to all of the ancestors I have identified, containing just their unique identifier code, their relationship to me, their name, and their dates of birth and death (with brackets in use to mark tentative identifications). This alone now runs to 27 pages!

It works for me ...

[Mike Morrell (NL)]

Good old fashioned Word documents.
...
It works for me ...

Hi jbml, whatever works is always the best tool! I'd suspected that 'personal notes' was the best tool. My background is in IT so I instinctively look for ways of organizing data using computer programs. But I'm becoming more aware of the limitations of these. Valuable (image) data is often not in the digital transcripts. And even if I 'digititized' that data somewhere, genealogy is much more dependent on human intelligence, intuition and rigour than on digitized 'facts'. I do enjoy learning more about my roots but I'm also enjoying learning about how to be a better (amateur) genealogist! This seems a great community to do that!

Thanks again for all your helpful responses,

Mike