My maybe weird technique for improving my genealogy skills.

We live in a golden age of digital access. Billions of historical records, hosted across so many websites. It's never been easier to find evidence of your ancestors while wearing your snuggie and bunny slippers.

But if you've been doing genealogy for awhile, you probably have figured out that a record being easy to find doesn't always mean that a record is easy to interpret.

When the immediate thrill of the discovery wears off, you realize you're left saying, "Okay, now...what the #%@$ does this actually mean? How can I actually use this information?" For many of us, this is especially common in those nineteenth-century records like deeds or court records where you find yourself staring at a wall of wonky handwriting and legal-ese from 1823.

You, at 11:30 pm on your sixth cup of coffee trying to get through a deed written by clerk who was taught penmanship by squirrels.

Sometimes one of the best ways to understand what's going on is to scale back and get a 40,000-foot view of the records themselves. We can get so focused on our ancestor that we fail to give proper consideration to the document and its own context.

Here's an exercise for you.

Get out a sheet of paper and pen.

Now go to FamilySearch and open up a collection of records--whatever you want, but maybe a record set that you find yourself a little mystified by. If it helps you focus, pick a location in a familiar state but (this is key!) in a county where you're pretty sure none of your ancestors lived, so you won't be tempted to go down a rabbit hole looking for familiar names.

In this exercise, the people are not the point! You're not looking for ancestors, you're familiarizing yourself with the records themselves--how they work, what they say, and how to use them. Get cozy. Make friends. Peruse them like a book. Don't be in a rush. Tell everyone this is what you do to relax and yes, you are fun at parties.

(For example, I recently did this with a collection of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania tax lists from 1800-1810. I'll use a few of my observations from that collection as we go along.)

Next, starting paging through those records. Seriously, just click on any random image and start reading the page. Read every entry, every word. Then turn the page and do the same thing on the next page.

Immediately, you should start noticing patterns and forming questions. Write those patterns and questions down on your sheet of paper.

What are you seeing? As you go, keep the following questions in mind:

• How are the records structured? Are they big ol' paragraphs? Is it a register? What location or time period do they cover? Pay attention to headings, title slides within the film, and introductory lines or paragraphs that might explain.

  • For example: in the case of the tax lists I was viewing, it's important to know that while the records are alphabetical, there are different lists for every single township within the county.

The heading for page one of the Cumberland County, Pennsylvania tax lists tells me that this particular list is for Allen Township for the year 1808. It also explains what the numbers in the columns on both the left and right mean. Image from FamilySearch, film 7856877.

• What exact kinds of information do they contain? Do they give occupations? Ages? Names of neighbors or family members? Witnesses? What kinds of questions are these records good at answering?

• Is there information they only give some of the time and not others? Do the other entries give any clues as to why that might be?

  • For example: in the tax lists, some men are listed with acreage and others aren't. The record doesn't say "0 acres"--it just doesn't list it. The records never give the reason outright, but the reason is that the men without acreage listed didn't own property.

In this tax list from 1808 in Allen Township, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, you can see that Stophel Cromley owned 72 acres of land, while John Campbell below him was taxed only for one cow--the implication being that John Campbell did not own any real estate at this time. Image from FamilySearch, film 7856877.

• Related: what information do you notice they do NOT contain?

  • For example: in the tax lists, some men are listed with occupations and others aren't, but even that is a clue! Usually occupations were given only for men with more unique or skilled jobs (think blacksmiths, coopers, and stonemasons). If no occupation is given, you can reasonably assume the person was probably a farmer or laborer (without a specific trade).

• Do they contain clues that could lead you to other records?

  • For example: if a man appears on a tax list in 1825 with 100 acres of land, you can assume there should also be a deed of some kind showing how he obtained that land, and you know it will have been obtained in or prior to 1825.

• Are there any segments that are in a foreign language?

  • This is most common with religious records. It may be a language relevant to the practice of the religion (think Latin with Catholics or Hebrew for Jews), or it might simply be reflective of the primary language of the parishioners of the church. There are plenty of church records in Pennsylvania written in German!

• Are there marginal notations? Page numbers? Case numbers? Dollar amounts?

• What do the dates on the record describe? Are they the dates the event happened or simply the date the event was recorded with whatever authorities?

• Who doesn't appear in the records?

  • Since married women were considered legally "covered" by their husbands and did not own property in their own right, you won't find the names of married women in the tax lists for 1808. Widows, though, yes!

• Is there any reasoning for the order in which the records appear?

  • For example: In U.S. federal censuses, we're used to understanding that people were usually grouped in neighborhoods. A person listed five lines down the page clearly lived closer to your ancestor than someone ten pages away. That's not the case with tax lists. They're alphabetical, so we should not try to draw any conclusions about geographic proximity based on listing. John Roberts and George Roberts might be listed next to one another, but that doesn't mean they actually were neighbors.

• BONUS: find out how to search these records, especially if they're not indexed. Is there a handwritten index at the beginning of the volume, or on another film in the series? How does the index work? Is it alphabetical? Is there a different index for each volume? Pick a name from the index and practice finding that person using whatever page or volume numbers it gives.

The best genealogists I know are interested in the records themselves just as much as they're interested in the people they find in them. When you understand how the records work and what they were created to do, you're suddenly much better equipped to draw correct conclusions from them about your ancestors.

A few other stray tips:

• Find and bookmark helpful reference resources, such as legal dictionaries or genealogical glossaries. It's so much easier (and faster) to get through a deed if you're not getting hung up on words like "appurtenances" and "messuage"!

• Don't assume that the records are the same for every location or time period. Laws changed and sometimes clerks (or ministers, in the case of church records) didn't always follow the rules!

Don't feel like dealing with all this? That's okay. Hire me and I'll do the digging and interpreting for you. :) Drop me an email: katybodenhorn@gmail.com.