Organizing the Splat of the Data

 

So, the data's gathered. Now what?

I'm sitting here, looking at the list I've harvested from a search for Laskowski relatives documented in the tiny town of Żerków throughout the 1800s. I'm trying to figure out a way to organize the great, big splat of it all. There's a gap in the fat middle of it, of course, likely due to the inevitable destruction of some records through the centuries—or, perhaps if I'm lucky, the gap is simply owing to a backlog in uploading indexed results onto the website.

Spanning the century in my search for this one particular surname was my way of hoping to circumvent the problem of missing records. Almost as if vindicating my hunch, I did find some marriage and death records towards the end of the 1800s which provided names of parents whom I hadn't encountered back at the beginning of that century. Yet it still is hard to sift through all this information and find patterns or connections.

When I think of patterns for ancestral connections, the easiest way for my brain to recognize them is to lay out all the information in a pedigree chart. But how to connect all these disparate names? It occurred to me that using the technique of a "floating tree" might be just the answer. That way, I'd enter each of these Laskowski names into my family tree at Ancestry.com, then cut the entry lose from the tree so no relationship is implied. From that point, each time I run into that name again—say, in a subsequent marriage record, or listed as parent of a child who died later in the century—I can look it up in my index (since it is floating free from any relationships) and then add the new name and relationship to that floating individual's entry.

Eventually, I'd have several clustered cells floating around, detached in the ether of my family tree. True, they'd be disconnected still from my own Laskowski line, but I'd be holding them in reserve, in hopes that someday, more records will be added to the various digitized collections I can now access.

Looking at the Polish website BaSIA, I've noticed that each transcription is linked to the scan of the actual document held in the Polish archives. Along with the link to the scanned picture, the BaSIA entry provides the date that each entry was added to the website. I've noticed that some of those entries had upload dates early in 2012, while others were added closer to the end of that decade. I'm fervently hoping this is still a work in progress, with more indexed and scanned records to come. That gap in resources from about the 1850s through the 1880s could contain the very information I'm seeking.