Bluebonnet Country Genealogy

Archive for the ‘Madness Monday’ Category

Too much cookie dough, what can I say?

I’ve been doing some preliminary work on my great-grandfather John Thomas Stanley’s file, getting ready to start entering sources into my RootsMagic database. Converting .pdfs to .jpgs, verifying dates, renaming images, etc.

There is a major problem with my data:

John Stanley’s WWI Draft Registration

John Stanley’s Death Certificate

John Stanley’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram Obituary

John Stanley’s Greenwood Cemetery Headstone

Did you notice anything unusual in these documents/photograph?

Check the date(s) given as “Date of Birth”

1. WWI Draft Registration- “Dec 25, 1894” (according to Ancestry.com, kinda hard to tell)
2. Death Certificate- “December 25, 1894”
3. Obituary- “Dec 25, 1894”
4. Headstone- “1896”

OOPS!!!

What date do I enter into my database?

None of these “sources” are primary for birth date. And since John and his older brother Henry were abandoned at approximately ages 2 and 4 respectively, the dates of birth for both boys were supplied by a frightened and bewildered 4-year-old boy! Their birth parents were never identified and the brothers were adopted by my 2nd great-grandfather Miles Francis Stanley and wife Trilla and Trilla’s sister Martha and her husband John Fair. There were no reliable witnesses to these boys’ births!

What to do? Best 3 outa 4? No social security number is given on the death certificate (although his wife, who died 24 years later, did have a social security card), so did John Stanley have a SS card? Without an accurate date of birth, can I request his SS-5?

Oh, yeah, one more vote for 1894. John Stanley’s 1900 census enumeration:

Of note, brother Henry’s WWI Registration and his death certificate list his DOB as 1892, and here is an image of the two boys, apparently taken very soon after they were abandoned (I’m thinking to document their appearance in an attempt to find their parents) that shows a boy of about 2 years old and a boy of about 4 years old.

So if Henry was born in 1892, that would put John’s birth year to be about 1894.

About.

So what date will I enter into my RootsMagic database?

For now, 1894.

(My great-grandfather was a somewhat wealthy man. I wonder why my great-grandmother never had the headstone corrected… if it was wrong?

I’ve been doing some maintenance around here. While I have a Flickr account for all my genealogy-related images, I’d really like them all to be housed here at my hosted account. I’ve tried to install a couple of “photo album” programs here, but I’m not really good at all the Geek-isms, so I haven’t been able to get that going.

Then I tried a couple of WordPress plugins, but I’m not happy with the look. But, I’ll keep working on that.

Next, I deleted my Graveyard Rabbits blog. Let’s face it folks: I just don’t have time to maintain it. I have posted to it twice since April. It’s gone.

I added a bit of window dressing to the right sidebar: Everyday Genealogy Fun! (our daily blogging themes).

Following Thomas’ and Randy’s leads, a few days ago I started a separate WordPress.com blog as a journal to post my daily genealogical activies. I think this is a great idea and hopefully will help me stay focused and productive. However, I deleted that blog and will post those daily activities here under the category of “daily journal”. Really trying to simplify things around here.

I am the world’s worst procrastinator. The worst. That being said, my Monday Madness is really my Daily Madness: my genealogy database desperately needs to be reviewed, repaired and re-entered. I try not to add anyone into my database without adequate, verifiable sources. At that I have been very successful. Bottom-line, really. I don’t just blindly download GEDCOM’s that I find online and add them to my database. I require at least one decent source.

Ok, so most everyone in my database belongs in my database. No source(s), no admission. Period.

The madness that remains is three-fold:

1. When I moved my files from Family Tree Maker to RootsMagic a couple of years ago, everything transferred over well enough, but a few items were morphed into jibberish, basically. Not all entries from FTM made the trip to RM in their origin form or context. A few things were just messy, simply put!
2. Many of these sources that I have gathered over the years haven’t made it to the database at all. As I said, I’m the world’s worst procrastinator, and adding sources to my genealogy database is one of the most glaring aspects of said procrastination. The facts are in the database, the sources are in the file cabinet and “never the twain shall meet”!
3. What to do with all the images I have acquired: the scanned or downloaded photographs and documents that support my facts. There are currently 5946 images in 519 sub-folders in my Surnames folder.

I have addressed this problem in the past by attempting to review my files alphabetically by surname. The problem with this approach is that I ended up discovering more ancestors, accompanied by the requisit sources, but still not addressing the original issue of the “messy database”. In fact, the messiness just gets worse. Not really solving anything here!

So what is the solution? Instead of examining my data alphabetically, I have have started going through those messy files numerically. Last week I ordered the RootsMagic 4 manual and have learned quite a bit of new stuff about the program, such as how to create a report that lists people numerically by the record number. This isn’t the same as the Ahnentafel number, it’s just a number that is assigned to each person by the RootsMagic program itself. Hence I am #2 (my ex-husband is #1), my daughters are #3 & #4, then my granddaughter is #5, then it jumps back up to my parents as #6 & #7, then my brothers and so on. My 3-month-old grandson (who I am just now adding to my database, I’m ashamed to say!) is #664, which is the highest number at this point. Kinda weird, but it has the advantage of jumping around in the database so that I don’t get bogged down on one group.

As for the images? No way am I gonna add over 5000 images to RootsMagic! I’m 51 years old! So, as I go through each person’s file, those images are uploaded to my Flickr account. That way they are safely backed up online and easily accessible. Not my ideal solution, as I really wanted each image with that person’s RootsMagic page, but I’ll settle for Flickr.

664 people to look at….hmmm, that will take just about forever… but hopefully not. Most of my more distant ancestors obviously will take a lot less work to update as would a more recent and better-documented person.

This is still a huge task that is gonna take some discipline and determination to complete. In the past couple of days, I have updated mine and both of my daughters’ pages. 3 down, 661 to go. It is very easy for me to wander, to go off hunting for data on someone else when I’m looking at a particular person. But I have to stay focused and not waste an hour looking for some scrap of info. I’ll check a few places and then move on.