52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks – Week 29: Challenge: What I Learned at GRIP to Help Me Solve My Samuel Johnston Challenge

This is my second year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow. I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails Into the Past. I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways.


I have already written about my current challenge of trying to solve the origins and parents of Samuel Johnston (1816-1869) here and here.

I just returned from attending the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh, abbreviated GRIP, where I attended the week-long class, “Tools and Strategies for Tackling Tough Research Problems,” coordinated by Kimberly Powell and included instructors, Angela Packer McGhie, Karen Stanbary, and Karen Mauer Jones. You can read about the course on the above link.

I brought this problem to the course. Our pre-class instructions were to pick a tough problem and write it up to share with other classmates. I had attempted to do that—many times even—because I have a half a dozen Word documents where I wrote about different pieces of the problem.

Key Learnings from the Course
Some key things that I learned from this class:
  • Review all documents concerning the problem. Really analyze them and correlate each to each other.
  • Keep a research plan by your side to add to as you do the analysis.
  • Good tools for analysis include making lists, timelines, mind maps, and tables
  • These same tools are good for the correlation, too
  • Adding the FAN club (and the FAN club’s FAN club) to the research plan. The neighborhood may hold the key to the problem
  • Spreadsheets will help manage the abundance of data that will be collected for this big project.
  • Scrivener might be a good place to work on this project. I can put all relevant documents in and keep all of my writings/analyses/correlations together in one place. I have struggled in the past with this program, but Kimberly showed us how she uses it, and it made sense.

My Find
One exercise was to think about our search parameters. I usually do very focused searches—in specific databases where I expect to find the answer. This week, though, with more global searches but using some specific parameters, I was able to find the death date of a daughter of my target ancestor, and I found the spouse of another daughter. These were big wins for me on the first day!

My Challenge
My challenge now is to pick the above tools and start focusing on my problem. I will start with the neighbors of Samuel Johnston in the 1850 census. He had only just arrived from someplace in Alabama (which is one of my major questions—where was he during 1840s decade?) so there has to be a reason he came to Yalobusha County, Mississippi from Alabama. 

Maybe one of his neighbors will point to that answer.

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FAN stands for Friends, Associates, and Neighbors. The term was coined by Elizabeth Shown Mills.


Copyright © 2019 by Lisa S. Gorrell, Mam-ma's Southern Family, All rights reserved.

Comments

  1. j. ralston andersonJuly 23, 2019 at 10:03 AM

    Your key learnings list is great. I hope you will make a talk using it.

    ReplyDelete

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