Restarting direct line descendant research and Rootsmagic TreeShare

I have finished my work on the John Washington Varner line for now.  It is not nearly complete but I will turn it over to cousin Kim for further documentation.

I am ready to spend a little time on a mini genealogy redo project.  Working my Varner line I will start at the end of the line and begin cleaning up my source documentation on direct line descendants.  At the same time I will work through all of the webhints I have in RootsMagic.  These will be from Ancestry, FamilySearch and MyHeritage.  At this time I have turned off the webhints for FindMyPast.  In addition to webhints I also plan to check on Fold3 for any military records.  I have found that the webhints fairly well cover, census records, SSDI, social security applications, most vital records and Find A Grave.

Now that RootsMagic has the new Treeshare option for Ancestry it is fairly easy to keep my Ancestry tree up to date and make better use of their shaky leaves.  That along with the integration with FamilySearch makes catching the low hanging fruit so much easier.

Vansant Road Cemetery (formerly Clinton Memory Garden) work finally completed

The last month I've been concentrating on completing the database work for the Vansant Road Cemetery (formerly Clinton Memory Gardens).  I've not only created the databases and updated all of the records but with the help of another board member, Bob McCartney,  we were able to photograph the entire cemetery and verify burial locations.

Once that was done I worked on the Find A Grave memorials for this cemetery.  As much as possible all memorials were updated with grave location, dates (based on tombstones) and family links.  As expected several duplication's were found as well as memorials created for people that were not buried in the cemetery. Corrections were requested and most appear to have been accepted.  There were two Find A Grave volunteer's who were instrumental in helping me with this projects.  Thanks to LaDon Brennan and Linda Everhart.

Because of this project no family history work or indexing has been done.  My hope is to get back to that this coming weekend.

New family members found in my Cobb and Smith lines - Continuing Find A Grave research

This past week I continued my research using Find A Grave.  It was a very fruitful week with several new leads and a few photos found.  Find A Grave has again proved to be an invaluable source.

In the Cobb line I was able to confirm the birth and death dates for one set of GGrand Parents (Catherine Bird Means and William Burnston Means).

I also located the burial location (and birth / death dates) for several extended cousins.

• William Zachariah Bird Sr
• Eliza Ann Derrick Bird
• Margaret M Bird Brown
• William Zachariah Bird Jr
• William M Billy Means 
• Missouri A Cox Means
• Estella Means Holley
• James Alvis Cobb
• Edwin Cobb
• Mary Francis Bishop Cobb
• Martha Catherine Warren Cobb
• Henry Franklin Cobb
• Mary Elizabeth Hogg Cobb

For the Smith line I located the burial locations (including birth / death dates for this grand uncle and aunt and a first cousin.

• Fletcher Lindsay
• Charles F Lindsay
• Mae L Lindsay

In all I found nine tombstone, two individual and one family photo.  Fortunately the photographer granted use permission on their Find a Grave profile page.

This past week I also continued my arbitration of indexed records for Family Search.  There is finally a project being worked for Missouri obituaries.  So far this month I've submitted slightly more than 2,000 records.

I've been keeping up with sourcing my information in my Roots Magic database but I've not been updating my trees on Ancestry and Family Search.  I've got quite a bit of work to do there.  Plus I just looked at Ancestry and I now have 508 new un-reviewed hints (plus a lot of older ones as well).

I may need to consider stopping the arbitration and concentrate more on my research and updating various trees.  Once the Missouri Obit project is completed I'll stop for awhile and try to get everything caught up again.

More Find A Grave research for the Varner line in Pennsylvania

Another hectic week has passed.  Now that I'm caught up with the Vansant Road Cemetery records I have been able to spend some time in other areas.  We did have a cemetery board of directors meeting this week and that went very well.  Things are starting to turn around at the cemetery.

I did some indexing on Family Search.  I was actually arbitrating the indexed Obituary's.  Didn't do a lot just enough to keep fresh.

It has not been a real productive week for research.  However, I was able to work some time in.  I was working primarily in Find A Grave,  I found memorial pages for nineteen family members.  Four of which were new people that had to be added to the file. Within the memorials six of them had tombstone photos and four of them had enough information to lead me to the death certificates.  I added two new surnames to the file (Bacon and Bell).  The Bells are Sarah Varners family.  They were mostly in the Juniata County, PA.  The Bacons are through the Anna Varner Dunkel line.  This family had skipped all over the country (mostly in Colorado, Montana and Missouri).

I have determined that Find A Grave is an extremely valuable resource for genealogical research.  Even though it cannot be considered primary source material the information is there to lead you to primary documentation.

Working in Find A Grave

This past week I have spent my family history research time in Find A Grave.  

I ran a report out of my Roots Magic system that showed all those with a death fact and no burial fact.  Then I ran a report for all those with a burial fact which I exported to Excel where I then ran a comparison against a  list of people with a Find A Grave source.  After removing those that had a Find A Grave source I then combined the two lists.  That gave me my work list for Find A Grave.

This weeks research time was spent searching Find A Grave for people on that list.  I found memorial pages for 18 people and only 4 people searched with no pages found.  Also most of the memorial pages had tombstone photos added.  So far so good.  

This next week I hope to spend more time on research and less on indexing.  I really only spent one afternoon this past week on research.  I did more indexing this week than I originally planned to do.  Got caught up in the flow.  Also, I now have my work process flow established and a good Evernote template as well as a source template setup in Roots Magic so that should speed up the process.