Previously untapped research hints

 

                                                              Norfolk where some of my ancestors came from

If you're like me you receive more email messages than you could ever keep up with. If you have Gmail, it's even easier to miss messages as they are divided into three different sections. I tend to ignore anything that isn't in my main messages and even my main messages are too many to keep up with. Emails tend to come from all kinds of different places, from retailers, writing related enterprises, heritage societies, genealogical societies and genealogical businesses like Ancestry or FamilySearch. It can be overwhelming trying to find the wheat among the chaff.

But, since I'm supposed to be doing my planning for an upcoming trip to the FamilySearch Library, I am, of course, now weeding through my emails with a view to eliminating a decent chunk of them. Anything to keep away from what needs to be done. Some of the emails actually look interesting which was why I clicked on one from FamilySearch that suggested they had information on my 5th great grandfather, Jonas Shipley. I'd never heard that name before but it sounded vaguely familiar so, of course, I had to look.

With the FamilySearch hints a rough family line of descent from the named person is given. In the case of Jonas Shipley, he was the father of Francis Shipley. Francis, in turn, was the father of Anne Shibley. Note the change in spelling. No wonder the name was vaguely familiar. I had run across it when looking at the antecedents of Sarah Minister, my 3rd great grandmother who moved from Great Yarmouth, Norfolk to London. Sarah who I had written about last fall.

Jonas Shipley was born in Dickleborough (Dickleburgh) and I'm pretty sure that was Anne Shibley's place of birth as well as that place name stuck with me as well. As easy as clicking on an email hint, I have a line on some research to look into while in Salt Lake City. Now to go through my emails to see if there are other hints that can point me to different areas of potential research. 

Image:

Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0> , via Wikimedia Commons

Resolutions and family history

 

                                                                 Some of the research I've gathered over the years

One piece of advice for genealogists that I've often heard is to be organized. Of course, there are many ways to do this depending on your research methods and the ways that you retain material, whether paper based or on the cloud or anything in between. Above all, the wise genealogist keeps a log of everything they have researched, otherwise they might spend time looking up the same thing not realizing that it is a repeated effort.

Year after year, I've resolved to keep my family history research organized so that I can see what I have already learned and where I need to look next for each family line. It sounds ideal, doesn't it? It also sounds like a lot of work and, to be truthful, being methodical bores me to tears.

This year, though, I need to take stock of where I am with my research because, yet again, I'm planning a trip to Salt Lake City. Of course, I've planned this trip for a while but I haven't yet done my pre-research in order to come up with a plan for where my hunt should focus when I am there.

So I'm starting to drag out the notebooks and thumb drives I've gathered from other research trips to find out what I have already gathered. This all would be so much easier if I had kept my resolution to organize my genealogy. But, then on the flip side, looking at my family history info with fresh eyes can lead to inspiration and maybe a few stories and, ultimately, that's why I do genealogical research. I want to piece family stories together from the data I've gathered. That's what makes it all worthwhile for me.