Someone on a forum I participate in recommended the program SmartDraw when we were talking about creating genograms, which are used particularly by health professionals in plotting family health histories. Genograms can have other applications, and I thought they might be useful in my research project.
I downloaded the trial version of SmartDraw and discovered that in addition to genograms, there are family group sheets, pedigree sheets, individual record sheets, and various forms for genealogists to track their research progress, such as correspondence record sheets. The beauty of these forms is that they are all computer-fillable! This has been a holy grail of mine for a long time.
With SmartDraw you can modify each of their pre-stored forms to fit your own situation. You can also create your own templates, as I did in creating the form I am using for tracking compadrazgo -- the godparent relationship -- in the population of St. Augustine, FL, during the Second Spanish Period. What I am finding there is leading me to investigate the importance of the patrón in St. Augustine society.
SmartDraw also has maps. Lots and lots of maps. And again, you can modify the maps to fit your needs. I may try my hand at creating some meaningful maps, especially if I can import formats from scanned images.
I was disappointed to discover that SmartDraw's timelines are completely business-oriented, and I am having a difficult time modifying that particular template. I will have to try more experiments when I have a little more time. But overall, I am very pleased with the usefulness of SmartDraw, its flexibility and its ease of use in connection with my project. I anticipate further uses later on, as well, when I am finally able to get back to doing my own family's genealogy once again!
Required disclaimer: I was not given the copy of SmartDraw; I paid for it with my own money. I was not asked by anyone connected with SmartDraw or with any other entity to write this review. Views expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Neither I nor any member of my family is employed by the company which created and sells SmartDraw, nor do we have any other connection with them.
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Thursday, September 16, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
The records do not always give us what we want
I have recently had an inquiry concerning a Spanish marriage record from the middle of the 1800s. The individual who sent me the copy of the record wanted to know why the prospective groom's grandparents were not mentioned in the record, to see if the page she sent me revealed any information on that score.
Alas, it did not. It often happens in these records that there is a variation -- sometimes a wide variation -- in the amount of information provided. You would think, for instance, that a will would name any heirs to an estate, or that an inquiry into an intestacy would reveal the names of heirs. Not always. I had one probate case -- in fact, it was the one I have discussed here before, of the doctor who committed suicide in St. Augustine in 1809. The rather lengthy packet of documents mentions, more than once, the doctor's two daughters. Nowhere in the documents are their names revealed.
And in the marriage record in question, there is no information as to why the groom's grandparents were not named, nor would there be. It is often the luck of the draw in how much information we find in a particular document.
I am currently dealing with baptism records in my research into the families of St. Augustine, FL, during the Second Spanish Period, and I find a tremendous variation in the amount of information provided. Some records list not only the parents and godparents, but both sets of grandparents as well. Some reocrds list the profession of the father or the godfather, and sometimes both. Others are mute on the subject.
One tactic I intend to employ, once I get all the transcriptions done, is to see whether it was one particular priest who entered the more complete information into the records. That may or may not have been the case, but it has my curiosity up. It could very well be that one of the priests was more prone to gather more information than the other one was. It could also be that parents just did not reveal a great deal of information about the family.
We just have to understand that we may not always find what we want to find in the documents.
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Alas, it did not. It often happens in these records that there is a variation -- sometimes a wide variation -- in the amount of information provided. You would think, for instance, that a will would name any heirs to an estate, or that an inquiry into an intestacy would reveal the names of heirs. Not always. I had one probate case -- in fact, it was the one I have discussed here before, of the doctor who committed suicide in St. Augustine in 1809. The rather lengthy packet of documents mentions, more than once, the doctor's two daughters. Nowhere in the documents are their names revealed.
And in the marriage record in question, there is no information as to why the groom's grandparents were not named, nor would there be. It is often the luck of the draw in how much information we find in a particular document.
I am currently dealing with baptism records in my research into the families of St. Augustine, FL, during the Second Spanish Period, and I find a tremendous variation in the amount of information provided. Some records list not only the parents and godparents, but both sets of grandparents as well. Some reocrds list the profession of the father or the godfather, and sometimes both. Others are mute on the subject.
One tactic I intend to employ, once I get all the transcriptions done, is to see whether it was one particular priest who entered the more complete information into the records. That may or may not have been the case, but it has my curiosity up. It could very well be that one of the priests was more prone to gather more information than the other one was. It could also be that parents just did not reveal a great deal of information about the family.
We just have to understand that we may not always find what we want to find in the documents.
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Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Reports of my demise . . .
. . . are grossly exaggerated. I apologize for not posting for quite a while, but it's been a madhouse.
Various family things have occurred, including a stay in the hospital for my husband. He's home now and doing fine.
Classes started last week, and I missed the first day because of the abovementioned unscheduled stay. But I'm getting back into it, and of course, I have a lot of reading to do.
Then there's my research project. I haven't got as far as I wanted, but I have a few items that I think might make for a promising journal article and presentation, which I am required to do as part of the package. I probably will not be terribly active blogging this term, and I regret that. Priorities must be set.
I will try to keep the blog going but it will be minimal at least until Christmas. Then I hope I can be more active at it after the first of the year.
In the meantime, let me recommend that you stretch your mind with Michael John Neill's Daily Genealogy Transcriber . He invites everyone to try their hand at interpreting the day's sample. (Shucks -- he beat me to the idea!)
Various family things have occurred, including a stay in the hospital for my husband. He's home now and doing fine.
Classes started last week, and I missed the first day because of the abovementioned unscheduled stay. But I'm getting back into it, and of course, I have a lot of reading to do.
Then there's my research project. I haven't got as far as I wanted, but I have a few items that I think might make for a promising journal article and presentation, which I am required to do as part of the package. I probably will not be terribly active blogging this term, and I regret that. Priorities must be set.
I will try to keep the blog going but it will be minimal at least until Christmas. Then I hope I can be more active at it after the first of the year.
In the meantime, let me recommend that you stretch your mind with Michael John Neill's Daily Genealogy Transcriber . He invites everyone to try their hand at interpreting the day's sample. (Shucks -- he beat me to the idea!)
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Saturday, August 7, 2010
My Favorite Star Trek Episode
What does Star Trek have to do with Genealogy? In the case of this one episode, everything.
I have a number of "favorite" Star Trek episodes, really, from many of the offshoots of that many-branched series (almost like a family tree, in fact). One of these, like many of the best episodes of that saga, is completely without bang-bang shoot-'em-up. It is a thoughtful episode, and it is about genealogy. The episode is from the Voyager series, which many fans did not like, but which I am very fond of. After all, we finally got the female captain that Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, envisioned at the beginning, more than forty years ago.
The episode is called "11:59," and in it, Captain Kathryn Janeway, not having to fend off this or that hostile alien race at the moment, explores a family legend. Like most of us, she finds that the legend is not exactly what it is cracked up to be. Briefly, the legend concerns her ancestor Shannon O'Donnell, at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. She was an astronaut, so the legend goes, and an engineer. She helped build a fantastic early twenty-first-century structure called The Millennium Gate, in a small town in Indiana. Janeway finds that the legend has flaws, and discovers the most important part of it, which apparently had been downplayed in the telling: the small town in Indiana, where Shannon O'Donnell did actually end up, was home to a fellow named Janeway, whom she eventually married, and thereby began the branch of the family tree from which the captain emerged.
In pursuing the legend, Captain Janeway uses the methods of genealogy, searching court records, vital records, newspaper records, censuses, and other familiar documents and sources. All of these are stored digitally in the ships computer, loaded with all the knowledge of earth from earliest times to their own twenty-third century, a great mobile internet "wayback machine." The rest of the crew gets caught up in the search, giving the captain advice, helping her search the records and history. First Officer (the series' name for what we in our own century would call the executive officer), Chakotay offers a tongue-in-cheek version of their own situation, as a future family legend might tell it.
In the end, the captain, though slightly disappointed to find the legend was somewhat less glamorous than she had been told as a child by her Aunt Martha, apparently the keeper of the family history, reconciles herself to the facts. Neelix, a crewmember, even finds a photograph of Shannon O'Donnell Janeway, late in life, with her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren arrayed around her. It is a great genealogical story,and to the uninitiated viewer, would have been a wonderful introduction to the fun of genealogy.. Many people over the last nearly fifty years have mentioned how watching Star Trek as children influenced their career choices later in life. I wonder if anyone has been influenced to pursue their family history by the episode "11:59?"
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I have a number of "favorite" Star Trek episodes, really, from many of the offshoots of that many-branched series (almost like a family tree, in fact). One of these, like many of the best episodes of that saga, is completely without bang-bang shoot-'em-up. It is a thoughtful episode, and it is about genealogy. The episode is from the Voyager series, which many fans did not like, but which I am very fond of. After all, we finally got the female captain that Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, envisioned at the beginning, more than forty years ago.
The episode is called "11:59," and in it, Captain Kathryn Janeway, not having to fend off this or that hostile alien race at the moment, explores a family legend. Like most of us, she finds that the legend is not exactly what it is cracked up to be. Briefly, the legend concerns her ancestor Shannon O'Donnell, at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. She was an astronaut, so the legend goes, and an engineer. She helped build a fantastic early twenty-first-century structure called The Millennium Gate, in a small town in Indiana. Janeway finds that the legend has flaws, and discovers the most important part of it, which apparently had been downplayed in the telling: the small town in Indiana, where Shannon O'Donnell did actually end up, was home to a fellow named Janeway, whom she eventually married, and thereby began the branch of the family tree from which the captain emerged.
In pursuing the legend, Captain Janeway uses the methods of genealogy, searching court records, vital records, newspaper records, censuses, and other familiar documents and sources. All of these are stored digitally in the ships computer, loaded with all the knowledge of earth from earliest times to their own twenty-third century, a great mobile internet "wayback machine." The rest of the crew gets caught up in the search, giving the captain advice, helping her search the records and history. First Officer (the series' name for what we in our own century would call the executive officer), Chakotay offers a tongue-in-cheek version of their own situation, as a future family legend might tell it.
In the end, the captain, though slightly disappointed to find the legend was somewhat less glamorous than she had been told as a child by her Aunt Martha, apparently the keeper of the family history, reconciles herself to the facts. Neelix, a crewmember, even finds a photograph of Shannon O'Donnell Janeway, late in life, with her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren arrayed around her. It is a great genealogical story,and to the uninitiated viewer, would have been a wonderful introduction to the fun of genealogy.. Many people over the last nearly fifty years have mentioned how watching Star Trek as children influenced their career choices later in life. I wonder if anyone has been influenced to pursue their family history by the episode "11:59?"
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