Who Should I Write About This Week?

As we are over 200 Family History posts and nearly 4 years in the blog, I thought I might share a little insight on the software I use and how it helps me to determine who to write about.

I have mentioned in a few posts on genealogy research that I use Family Tree Maker as my digital tree. It has a number of features that are really useful for me while working on the blog. One of these features is the ability to run a variety of reports. I can do individual reports, ones on a branch of the family, or ones for the whole tree.

For working on the blog, being able to look at birthdays and anniversaries is extremely useful. When we first started, I tried to find someone who had an event near the date I was posting. I also was rather haphazard about the process. With my software, I can run and save reports and refer back to them when I want.

Choosing an event

This lets me look at who has events on a certain day. I can then check the information I have and see if there is enough to post about. Here is a snip of the birthday report for November 1. I wrote about Richard Mendenhall in my Family History post last week.

When I was working on the post for Richard, I looked at his tree page first. This gives me the basic information.

The next page I look at is the person page. It provides more detail on the facts. I can choose what information is presented on both pages. If a person is known by more than one name in different records, I can add an extra name fact and choose which one I want to show on the Tree page. I wrote about names in a few posts, starting with this one.

You’ll note that I added a custom fact to my tree – Blog Post. This allows me to record when I have written about someone and helps me track all of the posts. When you are over 200 posts, it gets hard to remember who you wrote about and in what context.

Other reports for family history

There are some really neat features that can be found in this software. There is a places tab where you can run look at where people are from. This is super helpful if you are going somewhere to visit and want to see who might have lived there. It also helped in my post about emigration. I picked West Point Iowa for this example. The list on the side is all people who have West Point in their information. There are many more on the list as you scroll down. I can click on any person and it will bring up what facts are associated with the location.

I have also run a report with Birth and Marriage dates. This report gives me a list of all individuals who have dates listed in chronological order. It was astounding to see how far back we had gone. The first picture is a few pages into the report. The oldest date we have is 1520. When there are several people with the same date it groups them together, as you can see for 1884. For those people, I have a birth year, but no specific date. This also helps me know who needs more information.

I have excluded anyone living from my images as I don’t write about them in the blog. And that is the reason I didn’t have anyone to write about! You can search key phrases for Family History and genealogy research to find more about those topics.