I’m certain many genealogists have encountered it. The sought for record remains elusive. No matches turn up. Finally you decide to check some of the matches you know are wrong, and there it is: the record you were searching for was right in front of you the whole entire time.
This is what happened with me and my third great grandpa, Benedict Fritz. Or should I say…Frederick?
When citing newspapers in Gramps, I’ve opted to treat a newspaper as a single source, and each issue as a volume of that source. This is much like how you would treat multiple volumes of an encyclopedia.
Recently, Kris Hocker of Kris Hocker’s /genealogy wrote a post titled, Writing My Family Genealogy ~ A Long, Winding Path.
The topic of this post is the writing of a descendants book, and the difficulty in managing numbering in a word processor. This is one area where I think Gramps may excel, and I’d be surprised if other word processors didn’t have a similar feature.
Find a Grave provides a wealth of information that won’t be found anywhere else. You never know if searching for an ancestor will return a match, giving you the cemetery where your ancestor was buried. Often you’ll also find the birth and death years (possibly even dates), and checking the cemetery listing may return a few of your ancestor’s relatives. Even better, some pages will include a photograph of the gravestone. How should you manage this wealth of information in Gramps?
My family tree contains two types of people: sourced and unsourced. Every person without a source is marked as “private” and tagged as “unsourced” so that they do not “pollute” my family tree web site.
Gramps, my family tree software of choice, has a report option called “Number of Ancestors Report”. It generates the number of ancestors from each generation there are in a family tree. It lacks an option to exclude people marked as private. Below is a formatted version of the output report, which includes sourced and unsourced ancestors.
It’s been almost a year since I started with genealogy, and this first year has really gone all over the place for me. There were many times where it would have been nice to have a place to write about it, and that’s why I’ve started this blog.
Where has the first year taken me?