Review of Progress Made in Implementing My 2016 Systems

My list of 2016 systems for myself included the usual ideas, such as eating better and exercising more frequently.  Among those ideas were some serious commitments that I needed to make towards taking control of my genealogical research by documenting the sources I find and have found in the past.  Stopping the process of finding documents and not bothering to examine and analyze them until much later or ever.  Also, becoming more diligent about filing away the information I’ve collected after examining and analyzing it.

In looking back at 2016 and these systems that I created for myself to follow, some of these ideas did bear some small fruit and others just simply didn’t pan out for a myriad of reasons.  The documenting my sources did work out because I made a conscious effort to create citations or at least note down pertinent information about a particular source while I had in front of me and spent time over a period of months creating citations for items I’d found in the past.  After completing my research at a repository I wrote citations for the items viewed while still on site or immediately after leaving having that information still fresh in my mind.  Instead of writing these source citations sometimes weeks, months, or years later when I was trying to analyze the source later and write about.

In order to document, examine, and analyze these newly found bits of information, I came up with the process of after returning from a repository of entering the item into my research log which included the source citation, then entering the source into Evidentia and using that program to examine and analyze the source.

I tried using Evernote when researching online as a way to help me get into the habit of creating source citations when I found a piece of information or didn’t.  What I found was that it was easier for me to just not use Evernote when downloading a digital image of a document found online and instead save the image file to the pertinent research folder on my computer and record the search and findings along with a source citation in my research log.

Research update for August 7, 2016 (yes, I realize it’s November)

After finishing with the Sarah Daniel petition file, I thought that I would take a short break from transcribing and start work on another file the next day.  However after looking through the various files in that day’s collection I thought I would just transcribe a bit of one of the files.  I picked one of the longer files, Easter Johnson because it was so long and went into it thinking that I would stop after a page or so of transcribing.

The strange thing was that I’d been preparing myself for what I thought would be a very “dry” file, filled with all sorts of boilerplate and annoying legalese.  However, it started out with Lazarus Johnston’s will, which goes on for a page and a half and brought up various events that happened after his death.  I became so caught up in what must have happened to his children and grandchildren as a result of those events that I kept transcribing for about seven more pages.

I worked a bit more on the Easter Johnson file tonight, 10 August 2016.  And will have to force myself to walk away from it a bit, because again I find myself getting swept up into the lives of these people that I’m transcribing.  My suspicion is that even though I’m feel that the petition case is fraught with drama that the reality is that it’s just the language being used and that it’s was just “business as usual” for these family members and the legal personages involved. 

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this case and if I make more interesting discoveries when I work my way through the other petition files.  I’m making a lot of use of the Black’s Law Dictionary that David gave me several years ago and am also learning a bit of the meanings of the legalese that I’m encountering in this particular petition.