Discoveries in the 'Do Over'

What new discoveries have I come unearthed doing research in my 'Do over'? OurOntario.ca website: In addition to indexing newspapers from Barrie Ontario, there are now digital images of older editions!! And they are continuing to add more. Bonus!! This will save me from spending days at the Barrie Public Library scrolling through microfilm. So far, I have found the Brentwood's correspondent's entries covering the death and funerals of my great-grandparents: William Daisley Allen (1935) and Mary Jane Woodland (1938). Although their deaths fall out of the range of what Ancestry is able provide, I found the information very beneficial with listing various attendees at the funeral as well as a brief history of the couple during their married life. I did more searching on that website and found an article covering the 60th anniversary of my great-grandparents. I have copies of photos taken of the couple at that event, but it was a fantastic find to discover that the event had been documented in the newspaper. Trying to remember to search the site as I deal with each individual in my database - at least the ones that lived in the Barrie area. As I'm still working on my great-grandparents branch, that covers almost everyone! So far, I have found the 1925 obituary of the first husband of my great-grandparents' eldest granddaughter. I remember that granddaughter and her second husband as they lived in the house on the Allen family farm that my great-grandparents had moved into when they had turned over the family farm to my grandparents. I have also found the brief marriage announcement of that woman's parents. I already Ancestry's image of the marriage registration for that couple, but the Brentwood news article also gave details of the bridal shower and attendees. And in the same column, I found that my maternal great-grandmother had returned home from visiting family in Toronto and my maternal grandparents had hosted a bridal shower for the school teacher who had been boarding with them. Gotta love small town gossip news. At this rate, it will take me forever with the 'Do Over'.

"Do Over" or Not?

It's been suggested in the genealogy community for people to do a 'do over' with their genealogy. The reasoning being that most people did not do proper citations when they were starting out with their genealogy research. An another rationale is that with revisiting sources with a more experienced eye, one may pick up on additional details that had been overlooked when the source was originally viewed. With 15 years, give or take a year or two, of research, did I really want to that? When I first came across the discussions, I thought 'no way'. Several years ago my database got corrupted and I've never have recreated everything. I had been faithfully backing up the database, but all the backups were backups of the corrupted records. I had started adding images and the way Family TreeMaker handled images, at least at that point in time, ballooned the size of the file. The programmed wouldn't allow backup to a thumb drive, only the harddrive or CD. But my database was larger that what a CD would hold and I was constantly running out of harddrive space with the frequent backups I did. Thinking that had something to do with the database getting corrupted, I decided to split the database into several for the various branches. Which I have been maintaining for the past 5 years. But has several of branches lived in the same geographical area, I was finding more and more overlapping and was doing 'see' references in databases. Using Rootsmagic, it is a somewhat easy procedure moving families from one file to another. But it often lead to problems with source citations as a source wasn't necessarily entered the same way in the different databases. For the past year or so, I have tossed around the idea of merging all of the databases into one massive one as Rootsmagic doesn't embed images within the database, only links to wherever one chooses to store the image. Sooo....that gets back to the current exercise going on in the genealogy community. I decided if high profile people in the genealogy community are questioning the quality of their past research and are prepared to start over, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to do the same. So I did! For the past couple of weeks, I have been re-doing my research, doing my best to not just copy of my previous databases. I'm doing my best to only enter data found in legitimate sources. But I have to confess that I am frequently consulting my previous database for dates and locations to use as guidelines as to where to search to find a document to verify the information. Is the 'Do Over' going to be worth the time? You betcha! By combining all my branches into one large database, it will make it easier for looking up individuals and doing printouts of trees. And by forcing myself to redo research on individuals, I am finding more information than what I had before as more information is now available online that when I previously researched the individual. And so far, I haven't gone past my father's grandparents!