Thursday, April 21, 2011

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

As of March 30th, my free subscription to Ancestory.com's library edition ended, and paired with my busy life and the end of the school year, I have not made much significant progress.  Below are some minor achievements and future goals:

Achievements
 - I received a number of interesting documents from Kathleen, many of which actually confirmed information from my previously troublesome primary document.  I hated to think that Grandma Maureen had it wrong, so I'm glad there was some confirmation.
 - I have the phone number and email of another relative (a cousin of Grandma) who will have some interesting insight into more remote generations and branches of the family tree.  He is the only child of a couple who had him later in life.  Always helpful.
 - Kathleen and I also enlisted her Aunt Ellen, another one of Grandma's cousins, who has been working on Cunniff genealogy for years.  The idea was also proposed to create a narrative about that branch of my family.  I would love to do that and give it as a Christmas gift in the future to my father and his siblings.
 - I came to the realization that the McGee's are also difficult to research because the generations preceding my father did not have long lives.  Considering that my father was only a year old when his grandfather passed (at the age of 56), it stands to reason that a lot of stories remain untold.

Goals
 - To make a spreadsheet of the information I currently have and figure out what information is missing exactly.  It would be quite comprehensive.
 - Devise a set of specific questions to ask family members in order to record stories and other information.  Previous work completed in oral history has proven to me that the more specific the question, the more rich the answers tend to be.
 - Continue filling in the sheets from Family Tree Online, which have proven very helpful to this point.
 - Compile and scan family photos for both preservation purposes and to make my eventually narrative semi-illustrated.  The adage that "a picture is worth a 1000 words" means even more in genealogical research.

I'll edit this post later to add a picture.

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