Our Family Tree

As I mentioned before, I use binders to store most of my work thanks to the suggestions of the Genealogy Research Group. But I organize them just a tad differently.

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In our previous episode, we tamed the paper monster by making it easy to find research documents by numbering them and keeping them sequentially in binders. Today I’ll tell you how I organize my computer files.

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Now that your research is organized, it’s time to get a handle on the piles of documents you will be collecting.

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I found out just this past week about the Arizona Birth and Death records online. Like the Missouri Death Certificates project, Arizona has the images available on line. On my first try, I found someone I had lost track of. How kewl is that?

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I admit I was concerned at the huge success of the effort by the Missouri State Archives to put these records online. The first few months, it seemed there was no way the server could handle the load and getting the actual images online seemed a daunting task.

However, success has not spoiled the Missouri Death Certificates, 1910-1957 project and almost all of the images have been scanned and are available online.

Death certificates are available in Missouri after fifty years, so we can look forward to the 1958 records next year.

One of the first things you’ll find out when you start digging into your family tree is that if you don’t have your research organized, you’ll waste a lot of time. Either you won’t be able to find what you know you have, or you’ll end up doing things more than once. Most of us do this as a hobby, which means you can have long breaks where the memory fades. Maintaining a good research log is a big help.

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When I began my research on this family, I didn’t originally make much progress because I wrongly assumed Worthen was born in or around Roanoke, Virginia. His daughter, Margaret Eliza Lewis Burrows, was born there.

Come to find out, Worthen was born in California and lived most of his life there, with the exception of a short time in Virginia. Since Fanny was born in Virginia, it seems that he went to Virginia, married Fanny, had a daughter, and then moved the family back to California.

What was he doing there?

I’m in the process of reorganizing the documents on the site. The directory will be password protected to prevent ‘bot harvesting. So if you have a link to specific documents from your blog or site, you will need to update your links.

I recently discovered a glitch in the “Bad Behavior” plugin we’ve been using to block spam posts. It’s been working great, blocking hundreds of attempts to post spam comments to the site. Unfortunately, it’s also been preventing legitimate users from logging in! Don’t ask me how I know this.

After a bit of digging today, I’ve resolved the problem and everything should work now. But for those of you who who were caught by it, I apologize.

The error report gives the blocked user a valid email address to report the problem to me. But no one did! So I don’t feel a bit sorry for you!

The research group didn’t work out. Despite the best intentions, we had quite a few people who busily harvested the work, but didn’t contribute at all. So the group has been closed and deleted.

Thanks to everyone to actively participated and donated their hard work in the form of transcriptions and copies of documents. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.