My purpose in starting this blog is to share accumulated information on any and all Smith families I've come across in Russell County, Kentucky.
When I began doing genealogy research, I realized that Smith would not be an easy surname to research. Especially when I discovered 2 families with sons named Elias born within 3 years of each other! How was I going to keep them separated? I began to put information on all Smith's into various Excel files knowing that I could sort that information over and over based on any certain criteria I wanted. For example, if I was looking for birth records for a specific father, I could sort my list alphabetically by father's and have all of the children bunched together. Or I could sort by year and have a timeline of Smith information. Sometimes, when I sort by the name of the father, I find that there are 2 different versions of the mother's name, which gives me another clue to search for. I've discovered middle names to replace initials and proper names for children instead of nicknames.
I've been building files for each surname that I research, but I thought I'd start posting with Smith because that name can be the most overwhelming to researchers. Over time, my files have grown and this method has been very effective for me. I've found information that I never knew I'd be looking for when I entered the information initially. I hope that it will be helpful to other Smith researchers as well. I hope to gradually add a blog for each of the surnames I'm researching. Please leave me comments!
Now to figure out the best way to get the information into a readable format...
1 comment:
Lisa, I am sitting here with fingers crossed that you may have developed your ideas of easily sharing your genealogy finds online. 1st, unfortunately, Smith is one of the names I do have connection with, but I have been trying to find an easy way for three cousins of my RALEY line to share new found information before it is "ready for primetime". We are scattered about the US, and individual emails on GMAIL has been OK, but not really an easy way to visualize the new data and the way it supports our main line of research.
I won't get too deep into my frustrations as the eldest of the group and my not being able to quickly put the one sentence in a two page email into a more traditional genealogical format.
Have you been successful in putting
google docs to work for you, or was it an almost good idea that didn't quite do what you wanted to do? I see you are doing a blog, and that again is not something I would feel comfortable with right now.
If you have no time to respond, no problem, I'll just keep prowling the newsletters and blogs until I find someone else seems to have hit upon a comfortable feeling system. I'm good at following instructions, but not so great at creating new ways to use these always changing applications on the internet.
Thanks for sharing,
mhodgesGM@gamil.com
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