Ancestry Quick Tip Jamboree

It's time for this week's Ancestry Quick Tip Jamboree! Thanks to everyone who has sent in a Quick Tip. Please keep them coming so that we can keep this tradition going. You can send your tips to ADNeditor@ancestry.com.

Quick Tips may be reprinted, with credit to the submitter, in other Ancestry publications, so if you do not want your tip included in a publication other than the Ancestry Daily News and Ancestry Weekly Digest, please state so clearly in your message.

Have a great day!
Juliana

Reading Books Backwards and Making Notes
I heard it once said that you can always tell who the genealogists are in a library by the way they read a book, backwards, from the index, to see if their ancestor or other relation is mentioned in it, and then to the body of the book if they can find a familiar name in the index. I find this is very true of the way I read genealogies and local histories, but one thing that I have found useful to do, is that if the title of the book intrigued you enough to pick it up and look at the index in the first place, then you should at least photocopy the title page of the book. You can then use the backside of the photocopy to keep notes on about what you found, or didn't find (which can be just as important), in that book. If you keep a file or notebook of these photocopies you can have a ready resource easily at hand, a virtual mini-library of the books you have read from the back cover to the front looking for your ancestors or cousins, as well as the notes you took while looking at those books.

Philip Naff
Indianapolis, Indiana

Comb Binding from a Librarian's Perspective
I always enjoy reading the quick tips and recent mention of comb binding brings up a point that is a concern to librarians. I work in the genealogy and history collection of our city library, and we are frequently the recipients of donated copies of family histories--for which we are very grateful! It is our policy to bind them - with library bindings--for the sake of posterity. Because so much of the side of the page has been perforated for comb binding, I feel that it weakens the pages that are then bound in book format--over time, these pages have more of a tendency to pull loose from the book. Authors may want to check with their libraries before donating comb-bound copies--and save out a special unbound copy for that purpose.

Susan

Misfiled Vital Records
To add to the information given by James Braunsdorf, no doubt the situations of misfiled birth records are legion, especially in the Midwest in the late 1800's to early 1900's.

Allen County, Ohio, for instance, had a yearly deadline of when the births had to be reported, and since travel was difficult in the winter especially, you will find many recorded on that date. In the meantime the doctor may have lost his record, or relied on memory, etc. My grandmother's birth in 1876 was recorded a year late and under her baby nickname. Since the records are recorded by surname and then on a separate page of the alphabet for each given name, only a complete search for all of that surname revealed her record. My father's birth, in 1907, in the same area, was recorded two months late and he was recorded as a female with no given name. My mother-in-law's birth in 1910 in Illinois was not recorded at all. The family said the doctor was fond of "the bottle" and probably went to the tavern when he got into town instead of going to the courthouse.

One is most fortunate when one has access to the records and is willing to take the time to search them carefully. This is something the clerks usually don't have time to do.

Clerice Fisher

It Pays to Review
Juliana's recent article on censuses made me take another look at the 1930 census. I had a copy of my family's page but it's not a really good one, so I decided to go online. I knew for sure where my Dad's family was living in 1930, and I wanted to take another look at that.

However, I did what I term a “loose search.” I entered the year, surname, state and county. Up came my family, one of my uncle's and his family, but no grandparents or the other two uncles. And who was this Fela M Decker? Great grandma's name was Phoebe Marie. Fela has to be her. The dates, town, everything checks except the spelling of that first name. It's still a puzzle as to why my grandparents and those two uncles aren't shown somewhere but then again, both sides of my family seemed to be “census shy.”

As people keep saying, try all kinds of different searches. Keep poking. Keep looking. Keep reviewing what you have. In this case it paid for me to go back over ground I had already covered.

Stella Love
Benson, Arizona