Problem: what to do when building a family tree using one genealogy service, yet the digitized document verifying the connection is only available on a different genealogy website.
As I take that long slide down to the present from John Carter's own daughters, I'm running into many cases where applicable digitized records are found at FamilySearch.org, yet not at Ancestry.com where I'm building my main family tree. Granted, the most likely place to find records from the 1700s is either through government archives or at a specialized website like FamilySearch, so that is usually the first place I look. Yet I don't want to lose track of all the other places where I've searched for records. I want to find a way to keep a research log on my main tree even though the resource found originated at another location.
Although I have caved and started building family trees at several other genealogical services—that's one way to resolve this dilemma—I also decided, when possible, to simply harvest the specific web address for the document. From that point, I paste the URL into my main tree, at the appropriate date in the ancestor's timeline, using the "edit" function for inserting notes. I want to be able to go back and double-check a document, the next time I pick up my work where I had left off.
As long as the website at which I first found the document enables researchers to harvest a specific web location for that precise document page, this has become my go-to method for inserting documents from a different online source into a relative's profile page in my main tree. It's often as simple as cut and paste. It simply needs a consistent system to keep applying such discoveries to that family tree.
Now, as I begin the tedious work of adding the identities of John Carter's daughters' children, this will become even more important. I'm finding records from additional online resources, and I don't want to lose the ability to replicate the search by letting a document location slip through my digital fingers.
Right now, by virtue of the argument provided by genealogist George Harrison Sanford King, I've been focusing on the descendants of John Carter's (likely first) wife, Sarah Kenyon. By virtue of their daughter Elizabeth Carter marrying Owen Thomas, but then dying, widowed, when her daughter Sarah Kenyon Thomas was still a child, it was easy to see that situation noted in the wills of both the child's own father and her maternal grandfather, both of whom made provisions specifically for her.
I've been working my way from the lifetime of that child—Sarah Kenyon Thomas—down through six generations to our current times. The closer I get to the present century, the easier it is for me to find records on Ancestry.com, where I'm building my tree—from birth and death records to census records and the other resources we use to confirm an ancestor's lifespan. But for those earlier generations—particularly that time period prior to the 1850 census—the go-to documents were court records. And for some of those records, we need to broaden our search parameters to use resources outside the Ancestry universe.
I have learned that one-stop shopping is not the most effective model for many tasks in life. I've lately added genealogy to that list. We can get a broader picture of our ancestors' life story when we expand our search to utilize records and resources from more than one website. Just as I had discovered last fall and winter when wrestling with my father's Polish forebears, I am now seeing the same apply to tracing these descendants of my fifth great-grandfather, John Carter of Spotsylvania County, Virginia.
However, no matter where we find those necessary records to piece together an ancestor's life, we still need to draw up a record tracing our research wanderings. We need to find a way to retrace our steps if necessary.
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