WEDDING WEDNESDAY with a TWIST ~ How many divorces have I recorded?

Instead of my usual Wedding Wednesday post, I thought I would shake it up a bit.

 

I record marriage details in my Legacy program.  These can include the following:

• Date of marriage
• Place of marriage
• Witnesses to marriage
• Married by – name of Pastor, Priest or Justice of the Peace who performed the ceremony
• Where they went for their honeymoon
• Status of the marriage – Divorced, husband or wife deceased, Common law etc.
• Date & detail of the divorce

Out of curiosity I wondered how many couples I have in my database who are listed as divorced?

I’ve never thought to review this statistic before.

I used Search>Find>Detailed Search and filled in the boxes as follows

With the click of a mouse the list was created.

My Legacy database contains 6287 individuals.  Of those there are 2424 that are married. 

 

HOW MANY PEOPLE WOULD YOU GUESS ARE ON THE LIST?  

I had no idea.  And certainly, I am not privy to the status on all the marriages I’ve recorded.

 

There were 166 people on the list – making for 83 divorced couples.  Taking the number of individuals I have as married and dividing it into 166 people that are divorced, I get a total percentage of divorces of .0684.

Is that a lot or not too many?  Again, I have no idea.

I know my Dad divorced twice, my Mom once. My 3 lifelong friends all have divorced parents.

 

I think it’s much more common today, but it certainly wasn’t unheard of during our grandparents & great grandparent’s times.  As evidenced by my report.

Have you ever run this report for your own tree?  If so, I’d love to hear about it.  I know all you Legacy users out there can create the report and I expect the other programs have something similar.

 

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2019   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

UNUSUAL ANCESTOR NAMES ~ How Many Are in Your Family Tree? Where Did They Originate?

Most of us have them.  Those ancestor names that you just don’t see any more, or very seldom.

I’ve run across them for years, names like Achsah, American, Ancil, Artemesia, Awilda, Burdell, Calvary, Carpas, Dorcas, Gershom, Hazen, Jerusha, Kezia, Lavancha, Nabby, Orpha, Philena, Serepta, Simeon, Udora, Vivaldo, Zenis, Zilpha.  Those are just some of the examples from my own family tree, which has 5,539 individuals in it.

Of course we know that names can be passed down from generation to generation.  Isn’t that what keep us wondering “do I have the right person?”

There are common names like Mary, David, William, John, Matthew, Susan etc.  We certainly have no shortage of those.

Here is an article in Wikipedia about the origin of given names. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Given_name

What got me thinking about his subject was yesterday’s church service.  We were studying from the book of Philemon in the New Testament.  Now that’s not a name you hear every day, or one I’ve ever heard at all, outside of Bible study. 

Yesterday afternoon, I met my long time friend, for lunch and we were discussing the church service when she told me that one of the landscape workers in her community was named Philemon.  Spelled exactly the same way.  What are the chances?

That got me thinking about another name in the book of Philemon, which is Onesimus.  It’s actually Onesimus about whom the Apostle Paul was writing when he wrote the letter to Philemon.

I know that many of the names given to our ancestors were from various books, whether it was the Bible, some other religious book or a book someone had just read.

Being a curious person, I decided to check the records on Ancestry and see if anyone had the name Onesimus. 

I did a general search in United States records and found there were 29,054,223 records containing the name Onesimus or a variation of it.  WOW!  I was quite surprised.

I found many of the records were in “modern” times, from 1900 to now.

Let’s see how many Philemon’s there are.  This time I searched both United States and All Collections.  Here are the results.

United States only – 75,441,670

All Collections – 103,751,123

This has been a fun little excursion away from my usual research today. 

I know I’m not the only one who wonders about these things.  What fun searches have you conducted?

Guess I better get back to finding records or figuring out DNA or something useful, huh?

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2018   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

TUESDAY’S TIPS ~ How many people in my database have marriage dates? Let’s use Legacy 9 to find out

It occurred to me today, that I’d never tried to run any kind of report to find out how many people in my database I have marriage dates for.  I love discovering new lists I can create with Legacy 9. 

I immediately went to the Search tab>Find>Detailed Search and began to figure out what criteria I should enter. 

I entered the following:

When I clicked on “create list” I was shown my list of 2102 names.  The list is opened in the List View which allows you to go through the various pages associated with each ancestor such as Detail, Edit, Events, Notes, Family & Sources. 

From there I wondered if I could find out how many of those marriages had sources attached.  Dare I check my work? 

I went back to my original search criteria and changed it to Individual>Source-Citation>Contains>Married  This resulted in 896 matches.  Ok, not too bad.  If there are 2102 names in the marriage list and you divide that by two you get 1051 marriages.  If I have sources for 896 of those marriages, then I’m very happy with those results.

I played around with this idea for a while creating lists of those who were divorced, husband deceased, wife deceased etc.  It was quite fun to see what popped up.  Of course to create such lists you have to have entered something in the Marriage Status field.  Here’s a sample from my great grandparents. 

Notice the Status field is filled in. Also note that the icons for Notes, Images and Sources are colored rather than black & white, meaning they contain information that I’ve added.

One more list before I go.  I’d like to find out how many of my ancestors were married in my home town of Detroit, Wayne, Michigan.  I created my search and the list contained 133 individuals.

WHY CREATE LISTS?

• To help determine what you have or don’t have on any given individual
• To assist you in obtaining documents such as marriage certificates or records. Or any other type of records, based on the list you create.
• To assist you in completing information for each of your ancestors by determining what’s missing.
• To find out where you’ve made mistakes.
• Because sometimes it’s just fun to take a break from our research and play around a bit.
• I’m sure there are other reasons to create lists.  Please share your ideas with me.

TO FIND OTHER POSTS RELATED TO USING LEGACY PLEASE CLICK ON THE LEGACY TIP TAB FROM ANY SCREEN ON MY BLOG.

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2018   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

TUESDAY’S TIP ~ Keeping Track of Your Blog Posts - Here's How I Do It - What's Your Method?

As we blog about our families, how do we keep track of what we’ve written about and what we haven’t?  Sure, we can use the search feature in Blogger (and whatever method Word Press uses), but is that the best way?

After about 7 years of blogging I began to realize that I ran the risk of duplicating a particular subject about an ancestor. I asked myself…..

• Have I already written about this couple in Wedding Wednesday?
• Have I already transcribed that particular will or probate record?
• How about that Civil War pension file I received?  Have I written about it yet?

Here is how I’m now keeping track.

Using my Legacy database I create an Event called “Blog Post – posted on Michigan Family Trails.”

To add a customized event in Legacy follow this group of screen shots.

(click on any image to enlarge it)
       

Now that you’ve created your new Event you can select it and add your blog post.  You can see that is what I’ve done here.  We have an Event/Fact (selected from our drop down menu), Description – the title from my blog post and Date – the date I published the post.



The next step is to add a link to your entry.  This link will take you directly to your blog post.  In the image above you can see a picture icon (third from the left next to the Event name).  Click on that icon.  NOTE:  It will be gray until you’ve added something to it, mine already has something attached so it is in color.

The next screen you see will be this one.  Follow the instructions in red.


The next screen you see will be this one.


Enter your website URL – I go to my blog post and select the exact post I want to link to and make sure that exact post is in the URL at the top of the web page.  Then I simply copy and past it. 

Next – I enter the title of the post in the Caption area and the date of the post.  I have never used the description field, but that would be up to you.  This is how it will look when your done.



And, here is how it looks after you’ve completed adding the URL.



One final step I take is to mark the blog post event as PRIVATE.  I’m not sure I want these blog post events to show up in a family book or report.  I can always change that option should I choose to.  But, I want to initially mark them private.  You also have the option to exclude the event from problem checking.



Now when I am viewing information on one of my ancestors I can clearly see if I have ever written a blog post about them specifically, their family or something else related to them.

Here is a sample from my grandfather’s list of events. 



This system is working well for me.  I still have a lot of catching up to do, in going back to my earlier posts and making sure they are recorded as events for each ancestor they apply to.

Another step I take is using the Hashtag feature in Legacy 9.  I’ve created a hashtag titled Blog post with the description that I have published a blog post featuring or mentioning a particular ancestor.
 
Do you keep track of your blog posts in some other way?  I tried using a spreadsheet, but found this method works better for me.  I’d love to hear from my fellow bloggers about this.

I have a tab on my blog devoted to Legacy Tips.  Click here to find it Legacy 8 & 9 Tips

Happy hunting,
Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2018   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

WHERE DO YOU BEGIN AFTER YOU'VE TAKEN TIME OFF FROM YOUR RESEARCH?

My husband, Ron and I on the train from Fairbanks to Talkeetna

OUR VIEW OF DENALI FROM OUR HOTEL IN TALKEETNA - ABOUT AS GOOD AS IT GETS

Me getting ready to head out on our ATV adventure

My husband and I just returned from a two week vacation.  What with the preparation prior to the trip and being sick since we’ve returned home, I’ve been away from my research now for about 4 weeks.

That’s a long time for me.  Since I’m retired, I have the luxury of being able to set my own schedule (in other words, I can research pretty much as often as I want to).  Isn’t that what we all hope for?  Of course I still have other interests and activities, but I generally have time to sit down each day and do some sort of research.  Sometimes that’s just cleaning up images or reviewing what I’ve recently located.

Today’s question is, where do I begin?  Which line of the family do I want to focus on right now?  I keep copious research notes in my Legacy database. I enter the date I’ve done something and what that something was, what I located, where it was located etc.  This allows me to return to a particular ancestor and see exactly what I’ve done and when.

Legacy keeps track of the last 200 people I’ve viewed.  That will give me some idea of where I’ve been recently.

To view your History list in Legacy go to the View tab and select “History List.”  Because I use this list all the time, I have included it in My Toolbar, where it is readily available.

Here is where you will find the History List in your Legacy program.



As I viewed my History List today, I was able to go back to some of the people I was working on prior to vacation.  This helps bring back my train of thought at the time (well, at least I hope it does).

Another way I will decide who I might want to work on, is to go to my Ancestry tree and see what hints have popped up.  You know, the little shaky leaf.  When I first went onto Ancestry after my return there were 64 new hints.  As we know, new hints tend to generate as you work on people in your tree.  When I see a red number above the leaf I always check to see who the hints are for.  Is it someone I want to look at or a distant family connection or possibly someone I don’t want to work on right now?

NOTE:  I have turned off Member Tree hints.  This way, I am only seeing hints for record collections or media.  I can turn those Member Tree hints back on any time.

Another thing I did during our vacation, was to keep up with genealogy Facebook groups I belong to.  I learn a lot from those groups.  However, I don’t want to spend a lot of time online while on vacation.  When I came across something of interest I used the “save link” option in Facebook, which allows me to come back to that item.  Once I returned home I spent some time reviewing articles and tutorial videos.  One of the videos was a tutorial for using the Chronicling America newspaper site.  The tips I learned helped me to immediately find a death notice from 1838.  Definitely worthwhile.
 
With this said, now it’s time to decide where my next research adventure will begin.

I’d like to know what method you use to pick up your research when you’ve been away.  Maybe it was only a few weeks, perhaps months or even years.  Where do you begin?

Stay tuned for more posts about our family.  Hopefully I can connect with some new cousins or help others researching their own families.

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2017  Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION