Thursday, July 12, 2007

Two good genealogy days

I finally was able to get two full days of doing fun genealogy efforts today and yesterday - a full 10 hours on Wednesday (I had to go to a memorial service in the morning) and I expect a good 10 hours today.

On Wednesday, I worked on my wife's friends ancestry - and blogged about it here. The effort included digging out census and vital records from online databases, putting the information into a FamilyTreeMaker database, and printing out a report. Then last night I found info in online databases for several of her ancestors. I also wrote an email to her asking her for the names of her mother's parents and siblings, and where they lived.

Today, I got the answer to my questions and now I have more research to do. Great! More fun! Maybe tonight.

Because I have gotten lazy (frankly, I'd rather do the survey type of research) about reducing my paper piles, I realized I had better put the Rhode Island probate record data I collected two weeks ago into my FTM database. I worked on the probate records of Nathaniel Horton (1730-1819) of Foster RI a week ago, and posted them here. This morning, I entered the probate records of Richard Pray ( 1683-1755) of Scituate RI into the database, including transcribing the will, the court orders and the itemized inventory. This afternoon, I am going to start transcribing the probate records of Nathaniel Wade (1709-1754) of Scituate RI.

I need to enter the new data for our friend's ancestry into the database, then start on finding her mother's ancestry. I'll start that tonight (no Padres game again!) but it might stretch into tomorrow.

It amazes me that we can do a significant part of the survey phase of the research process online in hours - it used to take weeks or months to find the county books, the census records, the vital records, etc. Of course, that doesn't help a true geneaholic recover, does it? S/he (hmmm, I!) can get more work done in a shorter period of time.

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