Today I will begin the process of reviewing and analyzing what I have uncovered so far. This will help me re-set my priorities if needed, focus on missing data, and get ideas of where I might look for additional data.
I have updated all the individual posting to show everything I have learned to date. If any reader is confused about what or who I am discussing during this review, I suggest you review those pages. You will find links to the individual pages on the Kanistanaux tab at the top of each post.
First I want to re-state my research goal. Once I get involved in researching a family I have a tendency to get side tracked onto interesting family members that have little to do with my goal. Reminding myself of the goal helps me stay focused on the big picture.
My goal is to document Marleah Kanistanaux and the elder Dr. Lee-o-netto as grandchildren of an Abenaki man known as Metallic who lived in the Maine-New Hampshire-Canada border region during the late 1700s and early 1800s.
Now that I have learned a bit about the family members surrounding these two women, I need to establish some short-term goals that will help me accomplish the overall goal. Many of these short-term goals will become obvious as I complete the review process.
I already know one short-term goal. I need to locate additional records that will provide names of parents for the key members of the family. Local records such as death and marriage records are the first place to look.
At this time, I need to focus on the two women, their spouses, and their children and the older couple, Eli & Catherine Moulton, who appear to be parents of at least one of the women. If I am not able to find all the information I need for these folks, then I must expand my research beyond the core members of the family in hopes one of them provides some clue that will help me move forward.
For this review, I will be looking at the vitals (birth, death, and 1st marriage dates) for each individual in the core family to see what I have and what is missing. I normally do this step using my genealogy software, but not all my readers will use the same software as I do, so I have prepared charts using a spreadsheet program. This will show my readers the general process and demonstrate how the same can be accomplish with paper & pencil.
Besides looking for missing vital records, I use the charts to spot missing census years. The charts also assist me in determining where I might find the missing record or census.
I use a second type of chart to analyze the birth location information provided in census records over a period of time. This helps to determine the most likely location to search for birth records for older members of the core family. The birth locations of the children will also help me narrow down the time frame and locations for marriages as well as where the family was before 1875 and when they first arrived in New York State.
The last item I will review is property ownership. If a person owned property at the time of death, It may be rewarding to locate the probate records.
I will review each person in a separate post and end each of the posts with a to-do list in order of priority. The priority is established by determining what records are most likely to provide the most information for the least cost. That’s right, good research does COST money! So, it is important to get the most bang for the buck.
Since I have pretty much exhausted the internet resources (as of today, but tomorrow there may be more!), it will cost money to accomplish more research. Ne-Do-Ba has very limited financial resources for research projects, so I expect this project will begin losing steam by summer. This organization exists entirely on public donations. I am not too proud to beg. Please, help me continue this research by making a financial donation or by offering to locate records for us. Please – please – please.
Before I start my review, I want to mention how useful good genealogy software is in assisting good research. I use RootsMagic, but there are several others that are very good research tools. Most are not expensive and even free ones will go a long way towards keeping you organized – a must for producing good research. Anyone working on a family history project should start by investing your time and money on genealogy software.
I recently upgraded to the new RootsMagic version 5 (aka RM5). I just love the new timeline view it provides. This view shows all events related to a specific person. It not only shows the events for that person, but it includes births, deaths, and marriages for the parents and children as well. You can easily see things such as the loss of parents and children that might trigger other events, such as relocations. There is no end to the assistance this one tool can provide to a research project.
Other features of RM5 I use on a regular basis are groups and color coding. I am a very visual learner and have always relied on color to organize things. RM5 lets me use color to mark people, so I can color anyone with a military fact blue and then look through the index to see who the veterans are that might have a pension file worth locating. I can color all the direct descendants of a person red and then know at a glance when searching the index which John Smith was the descendant and which was the brother or uncle.
The people view provided by RM5 is a special kind of list of the people in my database. This list can be filtered to show only the specific people I am interested in. I can also customize the information (facts) shown in the view. When I have a very small project with a limited number of people, this tool is not very important. As the size of the database grows, it becomes indispensable.
Anyone willing to help finance this project?
Use the PayPal “Donate” button at the top right.
It is tax deductible!
See the Kanistanaux Home Page for more.
Do you have any information to add or questions?
Please leave a comment.
The Ne-Do-Ba Research Journal 