The Wandering Genealogist » goals

Challenging times: Sorting out Patrick Vaughan’s information

John Gasson — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 18:36:58 +0000

I have been taking a bit of a break from Finding Minnie and Patrick Vaughan whilst I get a bit of family history housekeeping done. Now it is the turn of Patrick Vaughan to be on the receiving end of that housekeeping.

If I am ever going to move forward with my research on Patrick and Kate Vaughan then I really need to get all the material that I already have into some sort of order.

I have gathered quite a lot of information from Ireland, Scotland and Canada like passenger lists, census returns, marriages and baptisms, but I haven’t actually input them into my family tree yet.

This week I am going to concentrate on Patrick Vaughan get everything sorted and updated. That means:

Setting up dedicated sub-folders for digital image downloads
Making sure all the digital images are correctly named and in the correct sub-folders
Making sure all the information is entered into my family tree

As well as needing to make sure I have solid foundations to move forward I also want to be able to tell the story of Patrick’s life before he married my 2x great-aunt, hopefully system generated reports will provide the framework for this.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

My Family History Week: Sunday 29th April 2012

John Gasson — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 17:31:57 +0000

It was another reasonably good week, nothing really new, mainly re-visiting various parts of my family tree inspired by going through my to-do list.

Challenging times: Updating my to-do list

I am now pretty happy with the state of my to-do list, I am also aware that it still has some short-comings. Although I have cleared some duplicates and even completed a few items, however there is still a lot to be done.

I think a lot of the items don’t really need to be on the list at all. By that I mean that I ought to be in a position to run selected queries on my Family Historian software to give me lists of individuals for whom I still need to find births, baptisms, burials etc. for a particular place.

Various parts of my family tree

I put in a fair bit of work on Edward Gasson and his wife’s first family and this brought my thoughts back around to my 3x great-grandfather Thomas Gasson and his brief time with the Metropolitan Police. I must order Edward’s birth certificate this coming week.

A little bit of creative searching has uncovered a missing baptism record for the son of another of my 3x great-grandfathers, Thomas Kinghorn. John Kinghorn’s baptism in London had eluded me for several years. It turned out he had been baptised in Holborn, rather than Westminster where his siblings had been, this still leaves me two more children to find, but every little nugget of information helps.

Future Challenges

I am still finding my weekly challenge to be a helpful motivational tool, but with so many things that I could do it is getting hard deciding what to do next. I may take the opportunity to go through my to-do list again this week and try to clear a few more entries.

It still has over 140 entries so there is no shortage of things to do, however there is a shortage of things that I can do without visiting a record office, and that is not likely to happen this week.

There are several people where I have more information to be entered into my database (Patrick Vaughan and William Joseph Henry Bateman are two examples) so I might get around to updating them.

One thing that did surprise me when I was looking through my to-do list was the number of men whose First World War service was not properly recorded. I have copies of their service records or in some cases just a medal index card, but I haven’t really recorded all that data anywhere.

On the same theme there must be many more men in my family tree who served in the First World War, but whose records I haven’t found (or looked for) yet. I owe it to them to make sure I have at least checked to see what was recorded.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Challenging times: Updating my to-do list

John Gasson — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:07:26 +0000

This week I am going to set myself the goal of updating my to-do list. I have written about the short-comings of my to-do list and what I would like to do with it, but never actually got around to doing anything about it.

So what do I actually want to do to the list this week?

Make sure there is nothing on the list that has already been done
Make sure there are no duplicates on the list
Make sure everything on the list is still relevant and needed
Make sure everything has some indication of where it is to be carried out
Make sure everything has enough detail to enable it to be carried out

Then if I have time I would like to start working through and seeing if there are any that I can quickly complete, there is a lot of stuff that needs an archive, but some material may well be online since I originally added them to the list.

I don’t really want to be adding any more items to my list just yet (there are already 165 items on the list) but I suspect one or two more will be added along the way and some existing entries may well need to expanded.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.