Ancestry and FamilySearch, FindMyPast or MyHeritage: Family Tree Trifecta Strategy

are you stuck on your genealogy research have you hit a brick wall are you chasing hints and want to learn more about really how to do research kind of beyond the leafy hints i have a new research strategy that may be able to help you get unstuck when we come back [Music] hey welcome back to another episode on genealogy tv my name is connie knox i am a lifelong genealogist here to help you go further faster and factually with your family research don't forget to subscribe and ring the bell so that you get notified each time i upload a video this video has two handouts available for channel members that's the info access level of channel membership if you want to learn more about that hit the join button below this video on the youtube channel alright so what is this strategy i created this strategy really for people like you who might be struggling to find the answer to some of your research questions as a professional genealogist a coach and from some of the viewer comments and questions that i get i can see that there's a real lack of focus and a real lack of a research plan so this strategy i'm calling the trifecta strategy and it is going to help you with that path now we're going to jump over the computer and show you how it works really the trifecta strategy kind of helps you figure out what it is you're going to research and it what it's doing is it's using uh the power of three and so if we think about three to the third power for example three times three times three is 27 so eventually we're going to be talking about a goal of 27 uh 27 new things that you're going to want to try and find and how you're going to do that is through three resources and you're going to search those three resources in three different ways so the goal here really is to try and find 27 new results and again we're going to search three resources in three different ways and so let's just take a take a look at the word trifecta for a moment you know the trifecta word is kind of defined as a bet in which a person is betting on the forecast of three finishers in the in a race in the correct order or a run of three wins or grand events the word trifecta also is latin or greek for the word try meaning three so um once you kind of learn this strategy it's really not that hard i think once you get the the idea going in your head you will use this over and over and over again so it's 3 to the power 3. hopefully we'll come up with uh 27 results so the idea here is that you're going to use three major resources you're going to search ancestry you're going to search it by name location and fan club you're going to search family search by name location and fan club you're going to search a third choice now here i've put plugged in my heritage as a third choice but it could also be something like the fan club i mean the find a grave website it could be find my past again by name location and fan club and so we're gonna kind of dig into that here in a moment but that third choice is really up to you and it's and it's what makes sense for you okay so again that third choice name location in fan club and that when i say name i'm really referring to your target ancestor and so we're going to take the tree analogy a little bit farther and we're going to talk about we're going to pretend that the rings of this tree are is our uh goal our target so we're going to kind of start with a broad research and we're going to in three different ways we're going to search location and i start with location and i firmly believe that this is one of the most important things you can do is to start your research with location not your ancestors name because you want to learn everything you can about the location in which your ancestor is located if you know it and then you're going to search by name in three different ways and then you're going to search the fan club and we'll talk more about the fan club in a minute but you're going to search the fan club in three different ways or really three different resources with the goal and the idea that you're going to come up with 27 different facts about your target ancestor that you didn't have before so the trifecta strategy is kind of a path okay and first you're going to identify your target ancestor who is it you want to know more about then you're going to gather what you already know and then you're going to define your research question what is it you want to know about your target ancestor and then you're going to search the three major resources again by location name and fan club you're going to hear me say this over and over again because you're going to memorize it the goal being new facts and new records and ultimately the answer to your research question so uh first we're going to get that target ancestor we're going to figure out who that is we're going to go over to ancestry and we're going to research there then we're going to research at family search and then we're going to research your third choice and we're going to search by location name and fan club all right so over at ancestry so every one of these resources has a slightly different way of doing it so we're going to dig in and talk about what it is that we're going to research so at ancestry we're going to target the profile which is the typical way people do it but profile either from the profile or from the tree that is the name research we're going to search the card catalog for locations and we're going to search all collections over to ancestry and by the way for those of you who just chase hints and those little leaves that are on at ancestry and once the leaves are gone if you think there's nothing left i want to remind you that ancestor used to say that they only delivered 10 percent of the hints and so 10 percent of the records i should say that are available at ancestry and so you're missing 90 of what could be there um i think the algorithms have have changed quite a bit and they deliver more than that now but um i just want to give you the heads up that there's a lot more out there to find beyond the beyond the hint so as we uh get into the typical way most people the kind of the common way people research is either from the tree they click on the ancestor and they click the search button or they they go straight from the profile and they hit the search in the upper right corner and this is our first step we are going to do this to see what we can get but we're also going to go over to the search box and we're going to drop down to the card catalog and we're going to search uh for location and we're going to use the filters over there and we're going to search location keywords and era but we're really kind of after location research first from the card catalog and then we're going to be able to drill into the records specific for your target ancestor so this is the way i start every uh search at ancestry and i filter by location first i'm really looking to find out more about the information about the location in which i'm researching and so uh to do that you know you kind of have to scroll down to the bottom it's kind of off the main screen here so i've kind of blown it up here on the left hand side here for you where it says filter by location and then what you want to do is you in this case we're going to use an example for north carolina so we're going to drill into the united states and then we're going to drill into the state and we're going to pick north carolina and then we're going to pick the county of randolph county and i'm showing you this for a reason by the way you can search you can also filter to the decade or you can search by the entire century if you want but for now we're just going to stick with randolph county on this and so oh one of the other things you need to know too is that you can filter by category if you have too many uh results in the upper corner there you can see there's 32 08 15 before we even started filtering anything so all right so we we have filtered by usa by north carolina and by randolph county here and we get one result and the reason why i'm showing you this is because it's a simple uh list but there's reminiscent reminiscences of randolph county and this actually does have my ancestors in it it doesn't have my target ancestor but it does have my ancestor jesse henley who was one of the founders of asheboro north carolina he donated the land for the town square and that's written about in this book so we get one result from the card catalog using this filter and it's got a lot of good history about randolph county here but if we change the way we're doing this and we instead take off randolph county and put it in the keyword box we get three results i'm gonna let that sink in for a minute so keywords can be very powerful you can use keywords for anything you can use it for you know what is the example they show flying tigers or you know 101st battalion or back creek church uh you know i mean there's there's a variety of things you can use for keywords it might change the results so you want to be researching in both ways and if you run into too many uh results you can you can change up your filters in this case i filtered it by a decade not decade yes decade uh 1860s basically and as you can see i have 6694 results by removing randolph county but then filtering it to the decade you can also filter down to the category if you want 6694 results is a bit much to go through but you might want to filter it into whatever your research question is might you know dial it in it might be you want birth marriage and death information if you have all the census records etc okay so we're going to now search by name using all collections and over here if you use the autofill when you search it loads up all this information from your ancestors profile but you can kind of cheat you can let the autofill fill it in and then x out which you don't want because i believe that if you let too much data into the search boxes it may hamper the search results so you're gonna need at least the name and event and a date for any era for any event that you have so ideally this is this is the ideal scenario if you have an adoption case or a missing parent where you have no idea then you're not going to be able to do all three the name event and date or even a range of dates and estimated you can always estimate dates but you really want to try and have a name and event and a date era in here and what i would do where the red arrow is is i would x out all of this stuff down below where it says lived in i would i would remove all of that um and i might even remove some of the extra information as well because sometimes less is more also pay attention to the right hand boxes this one says special collections but sometimes when you're get search results that box will say suggested records and you really want to pay attention to that because the algorithms are saying um hello uh you might actually want to pay attention to this box over here because we know that there's more information over here that is likely attached to the ancestor you're researching all right so now we've got the search results from that all collection search and there's several things i want to point out here one is here we've got in this particular situation with henry gustav henley born in 1862 um 18 416 results all right so that's going to be a bit much so we're going to have to to play with this in order to to filter it out a little bit and so you can play with the sliders over here i actually don't recommend this to start this is the last thing i do although it's the first thing a lot of people do is they come over here and they start sliding the sliders over to get it more exact and my experience has been that you don't find as much what i do is i filter by the categories and you know you can play with all kinds of different scenarios here you can filter down to the categories and you can also see how many record sets are on the right hand side of that column and then um also want to pay attention to the smart filters so the smart filters do this all right so everything in that green box is stuff that's already loaded for this ancestor henry gustav henley is in the green box that stuff that i've already loaded and you can see by the scroll bar on the right hand side that i have quite a list in there so what the smart filter does is it says well you already have the 1880 senses you already have the 1900 census and so on i'm not going to deliver anything from the 1880 1900 1910 and so on everything that you already have here i'm not going to deliver any more census records because you have them all and i don't know that that's necessarily what you want also keep in mind that sometimes when you have uh somebody appearing twice in a census you found them once they actually may appear again as it happened with my ancestor in laramie wyoming he was in the 1900 census twice he was in with his father and he was in with his himself and his wife and children in a house across the street but if the smart filtering had turned been turned on i would not have found him twice and i actually got more information by looking at both census records so you can turn the filter off and do the search again to see if you get something new that you hadn't gotten before so that's smart filtering ancestry has also added a new filter in this page where you can search by location and as you can probably guess by now i'm a huge fan of searching by location also pay attention to the category button at the top you can flip over and see everything in a nice group setting by category without changing any of the other filters and sometimes this is beneficial to see it this way and you can scroll down and see which category you really want to focus on and don't forget to open up all the results in the area in which you are wanting to search all right so we're going to do a similar kind of search over at family search we're going to search the family search wiki for location we're going to search the family tree for the target ancestor and the fan club we're going to search the target ancestor and fan club in the records so family search wiki has just updated this front page and so it used to be you could drill into north america the shape of north america and then drill into the united states now you have to click on the on the on the actual word north america in order to drill into this by location but once you do you can drill into north america then the united states and then the state and then to the county if you want but here we are at the state level and there's several things i want to point out one is there's a lot of stuff here on the right hand side regarding record types and then there's this big blue button over here on the left that gives us north carolina online genealogy records and then i'm also pointing out randolph county which we're going to drill into here in a moment but you can actually click on the map in the county in which you want to search and again the point here is that we're trying to learn all we can about the location in which our ancestor is researching so when we click on that big blue button uh we get the north carolina level records and then we can also you know i've kind of blown up here the marriage section for you and if you take a look closer at you can see that there are dollar signs next to some things that's going to take you to a paid service you can also see this little square with an arrow in it that's going to take you to another website and so all you have to do is click on the link and go there and so even if it says dollar sign i would go there anyway and take a look and see what it is that you have so once we drill into the randolph county part of that map we get a whole lot of information about the area in which we're researching and one of the things you're looking for border information you're looking for you know when the the county was created and all of the records that are available holy cow there's a lot of information on the left hand column there there's a lot of really really great information so then we're also going to search the family tree at family search and i'm saying don't click on the family tree button from the top menu because that goes to your tree i'm suggesting that you click on search and then family tree and then use the drop downs for the locations by the way you want to always use drop downs no matter what website you're on for family history you want to use instead of writing randolph comma nc you want to use the drop downs because they're trying to standardize all the locations on family search and on ancestry and everywhere they're using standardized locations now and that will help your search as well now uh my ancestor henry gustaf henley was born in 1862 some records show him in 1861. so we give it a range by a couple years either side of the date that we think he was born and we conduct our research now once we do we get a list of records and as you can see there's 90 000 records here uh well actually people found with the name henry henley now i happen to know that this very top person here is the right guy and take note of the uh the number there is a kind of a person number it ends at family search and that is something that you're going to want to pay attention to so that you make sure that there's not two persons in the family search collaborative tree remember family search is a collaborative tree so it's one giant world tree and you want to make sure that there isn't more than one person with the same same data and if there is a lot of times you can help merge that information so we're going to search now the records at family search and uh for that we go to the search we hit records and we again fill out the information now there's a reason why we're searching so many different ways is because you're going to get different results every time so here we've got results from this search and if you take notice here there are 486 results and if we take a look a little bit closer at the profile of the person we're searching here the information that you're seeing here there's a couple things one is the tree icon says that this record this person in this record is linked to the world tree the document is saying there's some sort of transcription or document related to this record and the camera icon means there's an image of the record which is really cool i also you know want to take note of the sources and where it's located and also whether this person is the primary person or is the father as you're looking through the list to see if that record is a direct record for that person or is just mentioned in somebody else's record so again here you want to take note of the of the number the uh the nine nnj 7j this number is unique to this ancestor you also want to follow this person click on that star and anytime someone updates henry gustaf henley i'm going to get an email about it remember it's a collaborative collaborative tree so anybody can change it but they have to put the reason why they changed the data or maybe they're just adding to it so when we drill into one of those records and we take a look here's the u.s census record for 1880 and it's just it's very similar to what you'll see on almost all of the services but the cool thing i like about the family search version of it if you click on the information tab they have a really nice source citation and you can click the copy source citation button and uh and then paste it into your research notes all right so we're going to do the same thing over at myheritage this is our one of our third choice options so you can use myheritage or you can use find my past or one of the others and keep in mind if you don't have a subscription to these services you don't have to the idea is to find out what they have and then decide if you're going to subscribe so what you can do is you can do the same thing you can do search by location family tree for the target ancestor and the records for the target ancestor and of course you're gonna do the fan club as well so at my heritage to search by location you're gonna click click on the collections catalog and then in the in the keyword box we're going to type north carolina and see what they have and see if there's anything that they might have that nobody else has and you can scroll down and see there's a little free button there it says service records for confederate soldiers you can search that for free without having to have a subscription to myheritage so we're going to search the family trees and to do that you go over to the research tab drop down to family trees and type in the information and we're going to do the same thing for the record search we're going to drop down to the record search and search all records and i'm not going to go through in great detail how the results from this because i don't want to get redundant on this but you're getting the idea if you have only a free account at my heritage this is the kind of information that you might see on a research results i asked specifically about this just yesterday and they said this is what you would see on a free account and at least it gives you enough information to decide whether that is promising information and whether you have that or not and if you don't have it you might want to take note of it and do all of your research keep the link of all of this information and then exercise a free trial for a couple of weeks and pull down all that information if you don't want to subscribe i also want to point out that my heritage has some features that nobody else has they have chromosome browsing they also have auto clustering which is um really kind of unique to my heritage and they also have this really cool um photo enhancer but this photo enhancer is uh my ancestors in laramie wyoming and you can kind of see the before and the after of what that house and family look like it puts skin tones on there and it makes the grass green and it's kind of cool it's not perfect but it's kind of cool by the way that house still is there in laramie wyoming all right so find my past another third choice option we're going to do something similar uh on this in that we are going to search by location we're going to search by uh uploading your tree for free this is a little bit different twist than what we did on the others and we're going to search the records for your target ancestor so at family search in order to search by location you need to go to the a to z record sets and boy this is really an eye opener for me when i learned how to do this um the a to z record sets is really cool first of all it shows you what kind of records they have and find my past is really known for their records for ireland in the uk and you can see over here in the red box exactly what they have they have australia new zealand ireland uh england scotland wales um and canada and the united states and there's actually more but that's primarily what they are known for so at fam find my past it's a little bit different you cannot search other member trees in fact all of the member information is really for the most part private when it comes to the trees and so what you can do is you can upload your tree for free as i have done here and then all these little record hits pop up where like on ancestry it's a leaf here it's an orange dot with a number in it telling me that there's five hints here and so when you open that up you get a bunch of uh hints as to what records they have and there is a ton of information here without actually viewing the record you can see exactly a lot of information about uh the family and the relevance it says it's 80 relevant to to my research here but it also shows uh the tree in this uh we found joel davis in another members find my past family tree and it says 99 relevant so you can drill into that and see what kind of hints that they have there in order to drill into any of those though you'll have to have a subscription but you can certainly see enough information there to decide if it's worth it if it's something that you didn't have on the other services and so it might be it might be some good hints there all right so you can also take your dna from anywhere you can download your dna and upload it for free to find my past and from there you might be able to find more ancestors also at find my past they're known for the 1939 register which is kind of like a census uh replacement so it says here in 1930 the 1939 register is one of the most important 20th century genealogical resources for england and wales in 1931 since the census was destroyed by fire no census was taken in 1941 because of the war so in 1939 register is really the only national census-like resource available for this period and that is directly uh quoted from find my past so i want to point that out because if you are jumping the pond and are trying to do research in england or wales the 1939 register is probably one that you want to start with so if you don't have a subscription to find my past you can really start the tree for free and see what hints pop up you can upload your tree for free and see what hints pop up and you can upload your dna so the trifecta gold to kind of bring it home is again we're going to search three resources ancestry family search and one other of your choice and so the goal is to try and hit 27 new pieces of data that you haven't researched before and you're going to search each one of those in three different ways location name and fan club so i created this tracking chart i didn't really i'm not a huge fan of research logs but i know a lot of people like to be methodical in how they're researching and so i created this um chart that's available for you and the uh for those who are watching on the youtube channel this is available for the channel members so if you want to be a channel member you can hit the join button and get this worksheet and uh so this helps you track you know when you researched it did you find anything new yes or no what where did you research it did you search on ancestry family search find my past my heritage or wherever the archives or whatever and each column here now is search by location search by target ancestors name or search by the fan club name and so you would fill in the appropriate column i've also created an example i did this on an ancestor you know henry gustav henley who i thought i had researched six different ways and uh you know in the past i just researched this ancestor to death didn't think i had uh anything left to find and so when i was developing this strategy i was you know taking my own advice and following through the process and i found 24 new pieces of data that i didn't have before and so the trifecta score in the left hand column is every new fact that i found and it could be boy if you found a new census record um you could hit uh you know if there's eight family members there's eight points right there if they you know have data associated with them there's additional points for each piece of data and so you can you can like claim trifecta off of one uh census record and so this is one of the reasons why this is ideal for people who have hit a brick wall they've you know done a lot of research in this case you'll only see one census record located here at the bottom the rest of this was all new information that i discovered and so this column here is new information found about the target ancestor and that is specific to my target ancestor henry gustav henley and what i found about him in the other column you know you always trip across information about other family members while you're doing your research and so this column is kind of like what i found for fan club members or even a little bit more distant family members but i wanted to make note of it um here i say you know maggie grigg her death certificate father of henry henley and loina loana greene same family but different couple because this family of quakers they seem to name all of their men henry and all of their women rebecca and so there are a lot of rebeccas and and henry's in this case this henry henley and he's living at the same time by the way as as uh this guy and uh he's married to laurena green i think is how you pronounce her name but i also made note of the links on the right hand side so also in this excel spreadsheet that i've created for you is a blank worksheet that you could use so long story short there are two documents available for you those who are watching on the youtube channel uh there are two documents here for you uh for the channel members and the the document on the right hand side really just kind of lays out exactly what to do every step of the way and um and gives you specific information about ancestry and about family search and some of the nuances of the different the different resources i hope that helps provide you a path and give you a little bit of understanding of how you can look beyond the research box that you're in and well a little bit more about how you can kind of bend your thinking in research and really search in so many different ways to help find the answer you are seeking all right the handouts are in the community tab on the youtube channel for the information access level channel members alright so there are some new tools for you to play with go forth and research until next time keep on climbing your family tree

Channel: Genealogy TV

Views: 28,426

Rating: 4.9310346 out of 5

Keywords: Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, FindMyPast, genealogy research strategy, genealogy research, how to research family history, genealogy records, free genealogy, family search, family tree, genealogy, family history, how to do genealogy research for free, how to find family history, what is genealogy tv, #familyhistory, #GenealogyTV, #genealogy, Trifecta Strategy, myheritage dna, finding your roots, familysearch genealogy, family search videos, familysearch tree, familysearch wiki

Id: 6fCVOXF15zs

Length: 37min 3sec (2223 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020