So I needed to figure out how to pursue my research. I did do a little researching on family history researching, and a lot of writers were clear that you had to be organized. I'm sort of organized, in a chaotic unorganized kind of way. Damn ADHD.  My habit when I was in academic history and churning out 50-page term papers (most if not all of which got A's, thank you very much) was to start writing what I knew, and then the writing helped me identify holes that needed filling, and then I'd go research primary and secondary sources to fill those holes, and keep writing. I figured I could do that with genealogy, but also use the actual creation of a family tree as a way to organize, as just adding names would give me points that I needed to research, such as major life event dates, etc. 

So I got myself a subscription to Ancestry.com, getting the level that had world access, since all of my ancestors came from Europe, and I'd want to be able to access international records. I also wanted access to newspapers.com. But I also supplemented it with genealogybank.com, another newspaper source. I used their modern product, NewsBank and liked it, so I decided to get their historical newspaper product. I also got a subscription to FindMyPast, which is a genealogical program for Great Britain. Since one of my ancestor families was from England, and several others were from Ireland, I figured this would be helpful. I also knew I wanted to have a copy of everything on my computer, so I also got FamilyTree Maker, because I heard that it would sync with Ancestry, and I also knew how to use it from creating my old money Cleveland bluebloods family tree. I also got an account on FamilySearch.

 I then made an inventory of what I had to work with at the start. I had a number of family documents that my maternal grandmother had saved, but it turns out that my dad had things saved as well, such as various birth and death certificates, his own father's naturalization papers, and various things he uncovered from his own foray into family history a few years earlier.  I had a STACK of funeral home cards from quite a few relatives that had passed away and my grandmother and mom saved from their funerals, which was very helpful since they all had birth and death dates. My dad had also done an interview with his father's step-sister from years ago about the family in England and their experience coming to Cleveland, and wrote everything down, so that was very helpful. I had interviewed my maternal grandmother back in the 1990s, and had actually digitized the audio tapes when I worked at the history museum and was experimenting with an audio digitalization workstation we had in the library, and I also found that my mom had written a term paper of her family history in the early 1990s when she was attending night classes to earn a degree that she was required to do for her job (she worked in a school, and they required the staff all have college degrees ... but my mom was a nurse, an RN, and didn't have a college degree, so she went back to school and earned one in the 1990s). It was an urban history class, so I'm not quite sure why she had to do a family history, but it gave me a lot to start with. She had asked my grandmother a loto of questions and had save the letters my grandmother had sent her with all the family history she could remember, including a stack of index cards that had a lot of basic biographical info for family members.

So I had quite a lot to start with and I could build on the work that people had done before I came along, which was helpful. I even found that one of Mom's cousins had built a family tree on Ancestry of the Irish side, which was good as well. And it turned out that although I didn't know her personally, I was still able to email her (first via Ancestry and then later just via our own emails) questions about some of the old family stories. There was also another cousin of Mom's that I did know a little, and he was always happy to answer any question that I had. So while I had heard and remembered many of the family stories, I could reach out to cousins of my mom's generation and pick their minds and memories for more information.

With that raw material, I built my first tree. I had done this before on Family Tree Maker and knew the basics, so it was easy to do, once I figured out how Ancestry worked. I quickly had a good basic tree, and Ancestry made things very easy with nonstop hints, many of which were absolutely spot on. Of course, I soon learned that they also gave plenty of wrong hints, and while it was very easy to just keep clicking on those hints and adding people to the tree or adding documents to the people, it was also very easy to get things WRONG, and then unraveling all those mistakes was difficult. So very quickly I also learned that I needed to analyze every single hint, refer to the original documents, and be very skeptical of everything I saw. I wanted to make my tree as accurate as possible, so I sure as hell didn't want any garbage messing up my tree!

 It does amaze me that there are people out there happily clicking away on the hints in Ancestry, adding wrong information to their trees nonstop. And of course, Ancestry then suggests their trees to me as hints, but I find that those trees are riddled with the errors that I worked really hard to avoid. Thanks, but no thanks, Ancestry. 

The errors thing also kept me from building a tree on FamilySearch. I think it's a good source to research on, but I learned quickly about how anyone can edit the trees on FamilySearch, as I added some ancestors and started building a tree, only to find that others would actually edit out known facts in favor of mistaken identities. I noticed this with a great-great-grandfather who had a common name, and someone had added a father and mother to him who were not his father and mother; I had used a variety of sources to find that the person with my great-great-grandfather's name and was born to that man and woman was actually born in 1869, whereas my great-great-grandfather was born in 1840, and his father had a completely different first name than the guy added to him. I messaged the person who did that, and showed the error and included information that was correct ... and they agreed, so we broke the link.  And then someone else re-added it. Interestingly enough, it was a cousin who re-added it. I've never met her, not her grandfather who was my grandfather's brother. I did message her, but no response. And she still keeps adding. Apparently we're now related to Winston Churchill and the family line goes back earlier than the 1100s, based on the names she keeps adding, all linked to a man and a woman who don't appear to be related to my great-great grandfather in the slightest.

So, I gave up on FamilySearch, except to use their research tools, which I've found to be very good, especially the Catalog Search, which I use to dig through scanned microfilms for things not indexed yet. And I've been able to uncover wonderful things with that ... death certificates, naturalization certificates, property deeds that helped me establish when ancestors were in the United States, and all sorts of sources that have really helped me flesh out those branches of the family tree.

And so my tree started to grow fairly quickly, but I'm obsessed with making sure the data is correct, so I'm really being careful to check and double-check every single source that I add to the tree as a fact, so make sure that it's the right person in the right place, at the right time. And the sucky thing is that I have a LOT of ancestors with really common names, so it's very very tough!