Your worksheet is a draft
document. It is a tool for you to use to verify that you have all the documents
you need to prove your lineage. It is not the final application so it does not
have to be perfect. Use the worksheet as a framework. My job as Historian is to
turn what you have submitted into a finished application.
When you receive your worksheet,
we will have filled in all the citations for events for which the Society
already has documentation. You do not need to send copies of any of these
documents. We do not need more copies of stuff we already have! If there are
weaknesses in the existing documentation, they will be noted, highlighted in
yellow. If you are unsure how to abbreviate on your worksheet, please review
our document on abbreviations.
Your task is to try to fill in
the blanks. You can see that there is a line for each birth, marriage and death
event for both the line carrier and the spouse with spaces for place, date and references.
In a perfect world, you will be able to fill in the place and date fields for
each event and have a source document for each one. In the real world, you will
probably still have blanks, particularly in those hard to prove middle
generations.
As you start working on the
document, start with yourself. Make sure you have a copy of your own birth
certificate that lists your mother’s maiden name. Fill in your birth place,
date and write B/C in the References field. If you are married, do the same for
your wedding date and place and the birth (and death if applicable) of your
spouse. Put the name of your spouse’s parents in the designated spot. Hint: I
will use the spelling of names that you put here – they are often hard to read
on hand-written documents and I don’t want to butcher names that you know.
Next, move on to your parents.
You need to record all the applicable birth, marriage and death events with
dates and places and provide reference documents that include parents’ names if
at all possible. Note the documents you are using as references in the fields
provided. Note: if either of your parents was born before civil birth
registration was required, a marriage record and/or death record listing
parents including mother's maiden name can proxy for a birth record.
Repeat this process as you work
backwards through the generations. You may find it helpful to put the documents
for each generation in a file folder to keep them straight. Remember, the most
important part of this is to clearly link the line carrier in each generation
to his/her parents.
As you move backwards, you will
find that civil registration for events stop being available. Look at the
FamilySearch Wiki (www.familysearch.org/wiki)
for detail on when civil registration was required in each state. Some counties
kept their own records prior to civil registration, but those are not complete.
For example, civil registration in Ohio began in December 1908, but it took
some counties several years to comply. Some counties had local records, but if
they do exist, they began after the Civil War. We do not expect you to find
records that were never created!
As you move back before vital
records, you will need to find wills, probate records, land records, family bibles,
letters, etc to make the required links between generations. This is often when
secondary sources such as published genealogies and county histories come into
play. If you do have to dip into secondary sources, you need at least two and
one should not have been derived from the other.
Personally, I love census
records. I try to find every one that I can for my own family. Census records
before 1850 are marginally useful as only the heads of households are listed,
and there is not enough information to be sure that you have identified the
correct person, particularly for men with common names. Census records from
1850 to 1870 are better because all names in the household are listed, but
there are no relationships specified. Marriages and parent/child relationships
are implied, but not proved. Several sequential enumerations with the same
family group do make that implication stronger. Census records beginning with
1880 do list relationships so they are more useful, but are still secondary
sources. The Historian General does not want to see every possible census
record – just the ones that provide helpful information that is not found in
other documents.
Remember with all these
documents, that there can be errors. People lied, particularly about ages, and
people made up answers when they did not know what was correct. Any document
that is a copy of an original (such as census records) may include
transcription errors. If you find documents that show conflicting information,
include them all and we will just acknowledge that there are inconsistencies.
