Genealogy Proof Series: Extracting and Recording Data So That You Can Find It

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This is the second article in the series, Genealogy Proof Series. The first article is:

The first article discussed finding location resources for where your ancestor may have lived. Of course, once you find those resources, you’ll want to start searching for your ancestor, your ancestral surname and recording the information.

So let me stress one thing now. You’re not searching for your ancestor specifically. You’re searching for everyone with that surname because they all have a role in his or her story.

Information

Genealogy research and proving someone is actually your ancestor is all about data. Pieces of data linked together provide information. Information identifies your ancestors and their family members.

How many of you know you once found something but can’t find it now and have no idea where you put it?

What? You too???

This article is about how to search those resources once you find them, who to record, and how so that you’ll be able to analyze the resulting information.

Elizabeth Shown Mills introduced the concept of the FAN Club in 1987, which she documents in her book Evidence Explained – Friends and Neighbors. People found with or near various groups of people will help sort out who is whom, especially in the case of same-named men.

In order to evaluate who is found with various families in a specific location, you need to methodically organize your data as you transcribe it.

Extracting and Recording Your Data

After you have compiled a list of what’s available for your specific counties, you need to extract and transcribe records into a spreadsheet. If you don’t like spreadsheets, you can do the same thing in a table. But it’s critical that you do it someplace.

You’ll also index the information as you go so you can reasonably retrieve it. This is why I utilize spreadsheets – they are made for filtering and sorting.

I’m also going to touch on using AI to help with transcriptions. If you just cringed, please don’t. This is easy, I promise.

Before I share the first screenshot of my spreadsheet, I want to set the stage a bit.

I started this particular spreadsheet 25-30 years ago. There were no guidelines for spreadsheets or for organizing genealogical data. So, I’m going to share the mistakes I made and, with the benefit of hindsight, what I wish I had done differently.

Here are the first four entries (rows) in my Halifax County, VA spreadsheet where I was extracting and recording entries for multiple primary surnames.

  • Estes
  • Younger
  • Combs
  • Rice
  • Moore

In some cases, I had rumors about how these people connected. In other cases, something written decades before with no sources. And in yet other cases, I was the first researcher to plow that ground so I had no idea of who I was looking for. I needed to verify that my ancestor was actually from there before I could figure out who their parents were.

Of course, this means that over the years, I discovered that I needed to research additional surnames that I didn’t initially look for.

Following the Path

My first foray into Halifax County was via an obtuse reference from Claiborne County, Tennessee to my ancestor, John R. Estes, being from Fairfax County, Virginia, not Halifax County.

Thank goodness for this reference, even if it was inaccurate. A local lawyer. P. G. Fulkerson (1840-1929) practiced in Claiborne County. He recorded his remembrances about roughly 300 early families and more than 4,000 people. Beginning in 1979, they were published in a series of “Early Settler” columns in the local newspaper and later indexed. I have many of the newspaper clippings themselves.

What did Mr. Fulkerson say about John R. Estes?

I’m going to scan the article and let AI transcribe it. It’s super easy!

Scan and Transcribe

I scanned this page on my flatbed scanner. Today, I could also take a photo with my phone or a screenshot on a computer.

After scanning the page, I cropped the rightmost column but left the rest to preserve the date.

As an experiment, I scanned the page a second time using my scanner’s OCR (Optical Character Recognition) function, but the results were rather poor. The formatting was off, and lots of words couldn’t be read, as you can see below.

Fixing this would have required as much work as transcribing John Estes’s portion in the first place.

ChatGPT 4o

I took the original article scan and submitted it to ChatGPT

Here’s the entire interaction. I pasted the image and requested a transcription. About 15 seconds later, ChatGPT complied.

The output was text, just like you see above, so I could just copy and paste. Chat GPT was intelligent enough to format correctly and logically fill in the gaps that the scanner OCR hadn’t been able to read.

You can see that this is MUCH better. More importantly, it’s accurately transcribed and easy to confirm. No additional work is needed. I simply deleted the additional text that I didn’t need.

AI is just that easy. You can also use ChatGPT to create a spreadsheet showing the relationships and interactions of the people in the text.

Here’s my request to ChatGPT with the text I want it to process.

There’s a LOT you can do with AI very easily, but for now, let’s move on and work with our extracted information.

Keep AI in mind, though, because you might eventually want to submit everything about a surname to ChatGPT and ask for some type of summary. Always validate the results.

Original Information

Is the original information in the Fulkerson article fully accurate? No, but it gave me something to start with – which was one heck of a lot better than the nothing I had before.

Actually, there’s a LOT of information here:

  • John’s name, including his middle initial. (The middle initial turned out to be important because there were multiple John Esteses in Halifax County, VA.)
  • John’s original location of Fairfax County (Inaccurate, but it was in Virginia. Remember, Fulkerson’s handwritten notes have twice been transcribed. Once typed and then once for publication.)
  • John’s wife’s name – Nancy Moore. (Accurate, except she was called Nancy, Ann, and Nancy Ann Moore in various locations and records.)
  • They married before arriving in Claiborne County. (accurate)
  • When they arrived – prior to 1800. (Inaccurate – it was closer to 1820. He fought in the War of 1812 out of Halifax County.)
  • Location in Claiborne County – Little Sycamore Creek. (accurate)
  • Children’s names (All children are accounted for except the two who died as children before Fulkerson was born.)
  • Children’s spouses’ names. (Two were misspelled, Cloud is Clouse, Rudledge is Rutledge. George married Ollie Pittman, not a Willis. Lucy’s husband was Coleman Rush.)
  • John’s son’s middle initial – John Y. Estes. (That turned out to be important because John R. Estes’s mother’s birth surname was Younger.)
  • Where the children moved to. (Some locations were simply wrong. Others might have been stops on the way to a different location. My ancestor, John Y. Estes, wound up in Texas and never lived in Kentucky, so this error sent me on a wild goose chase.)
  • John’s age of 105 when he died. (He did live to be quite old, about 98 – and his advanced age was certainly part of his legacy.)

Where do I go from here? I didn’t know it at first, but Fairfax County was wrong. I searched but couldn’t find anything there, so I widened my net.

The First Breakthrough

I did a LOT of searching before I eventually found a reference to a marriage record for John R. Estes and Ann Moore in Halifax, not Fairfax County, Virginia. I was suspicious because Nancy is not Ann, but those names are often used synonymously for each other. After I found that record, I still needed to prove it was my John Estes and Nancy Moore.

Today, finding a marriage record is generally much easier because many records are available online by surname, through genealogy sites, such as FamilySearch and others, and by location. Online records were not available at that time.

Back then, I was relegated to library visits, courthouses, and microfilm or microfiche that the LDS church would order into their local Family History Center for me.

Once I located a reference to that marriage record in Halifax County, VA, I knew that I needed to visit the courthouse there. I wanted a copy of the original, plus I needed more information which would only be found in that courthouse. Thank goodness it hadn’t burned.

It might seem like that marriage record was an answer, but really, it was just the starting point for a very long line of questions.

Halifax County, VA Courthouse

Once in Halifax County, I spent two weeks, opening to closing, in the dusty damp basement of this courthouse where I was in Seventh Heaven. Occasionally one of the staff would come to check on me to be sure I was still alive!

There weren’t cell phones or digital cameras, so I took notes on pad after pad after pad of legal paper. I had to get everything that even MIGHT be useful while I was there, because the drive was about 700 miles through treacherous mountains, one way.

It was treacherous on those backroads, but it was also stunningly beautiful, and I never fell out of love with my ancestral connection to this place.

I would transcribe and analyze those handwritten notes later, after I got home. I wasn’t going to waste valuable research time in Halifax County going over the information I had retrieved.

Needless to say, I had to devise a methodology to organize that information. I also made discoveries, some of which necessitated additional trips. However, it was information from those initial forays that provided hints and research fodder.

Important Information

On that first trip, I didn’t realize that additional people were important in documents. I didn’t know which of the many people with the surname of Estes and even more with the surname of Moore were my family – if any.

I didn’t know what was important and what was not, so I began recording everything.

For example, let’s look at the fourth item in my spreadsheet.

  • The item number is my serially assigned number, not to be confused with a spreadsheet row assigned by Excel, which is shown at far left.
  • The source is the book or resource where I found the information. You’ll notice immediately that I did NOT record the page number, and I should have. My bad – but I know now.
  • The year and date, of course.
  • The last and first name of the person in the text, in separate columns to facilitate sorting.
  • Their role in the document – defendant, plaintiff, lawyer, etc.
  • Places, which include roads, waterways, proximity to landmarks, etc. In later spreadsheets, I added a separate column for watercourses.
  • Today, I would also add a column for a link to where I found the info online.
  • I transcribed the full text of the entry and added a separate row, as you can see to the left, for each person in the entry. You can only see 5 here, but all 7 people found in the text have the exact same entry in the spreadsheet, except for their role and their name, of course.

I wish I had a single entry for which surnames I’ve actually searched a document for, the date and how, meaning in person or a book, or what. Let’s say I actively transcribed all of the Estes and Moore items from the index. I happened to find several Combs individuals in those records, but I didn’t search specifically for Combs. I wish I had made note of that because otherwise, I’m missing actual Combs entries.

If you’re thinking to yourself that this process is extremely labor intensive, perhaps obsessive and you won’t need a lot of it eventually – you might well be right. However, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU DON’T NEED UNTIL LATER. So you also don’t know what you’re missing and I guarantee you, the ONE THING you will need will be in what you don’t have.

Because I did a poor job of documenting what I covered during my first visit, including books where I didn’t find anything, I had to review them again – and sometimes, I found things I had missed or ignored the first time, thinking they weren’t relevant.

If you don’t enter everything, you won’t be able to:

  • Sort to see how many times you find a particular person associated with your family members.
  • Sort for everyone in a particular location, like Birches Creek.
  • Sort for people on Roanoke Road.
  • Sort for someone who witnessed a deed to see what other transactions and interactions they had with people in your spreadsheet, which is really a form of database.

If you don’t enter everything, you’ll be missing a lot of important information.

Secondary Spreadsheets

Sometimes, I create secondary spreadsheets. I find these useful for records such as census, personal tax, and land tax records.

Using those records, I was able to track groups of people, with their locations, correlated with deeds, across time from 1750 through 1817.

The bond for the marriage between John Estes and Ann Moore was provided by John R. Estes and William Moore who would have been a close relative of the bride. The name of William Moore provided me with a “direction” in which to look, which is exactly why I transcribed every document type I could find in that courthouse. On the tax lists, I found two distinct groups of Moore men. William Moore was grouped with a different group of men than the Dan River group of Joseph, John, and Alexander Moore.

Using documents across multiple years, it was easy to group these people together. I quickly discovered that John, Alexander, and Joseph Moore lived on the Dan River, near South Boston, while the William Moore and James Moore group lived on the west side of the county on the second fork of Birches Creek, about 15 miles away from the Dan River group.

Eventually, years later, Y-DNA would confirm that these two groups were not paternally related.

Clearly, this land and tax information won’t fit on the columns of the original Halifax Spreadsheet, so this information is stored on a separate tab titled “Land Tax Summary,” shown above.

I have yet another tab titled “Census.” I do enter placeholders for the appropriate person and year into the original spreadsheet pointing me to the Land/Tax and Census tabs.

As I continued with my research, I was extremely grateful that I had recorded everything, because, as luck would have it, the signatures, marks of those who couldn’t sign, neighbors, and locations were critical to finding my way back to Prince Edward, then Amelia County where this Moore family had come from before settling in Halifax County.

Eventually, it would be revealed that Edward Henderson, a witness to the deed above, was the uncle of Nancy Ann Moore. Nancy’s son, John Y. Estes, would marry a Dodson female. Yes, the Dodsons who migrated to Claiborne and Hawkins County lived down the road from the Birches Creek Moore family in Halifax County. Charles Spradling lived with James Moore at one point and is somehow related, but we still don’t know exactly how.

Can you see how valuable these records that include people we don’t know turn out to be?

When I finished transcribing these records, there were 173 entries for the surname Henderson. Many of these records documented relationships with other people, proximity to land, and inheritance. These, along with other transactions, connected many dots.

If you’re thinking I’ve strayed far from John R. Estes, I really haven’t. These families were all allied in some way. John’s father and grandfather were involved with Nancy Ann Moore’s family. I suspect they attended the same church. William Moore was a minister, and John’s mother’s Younger family and his grandmother’s Combs family lived nearby and probably attended the church that William Moore pastored.

Follow the Path

My Estes ancestral path led to the Combs and Younger families and from Halifax County to King and Queen County and Amelia County, Virginia. The Moores led to the Rice family and to Prince Edward, Amelia, and New Kent Counties.

I did not create a new spreadsheet for those counties. I simply continued to add to the same spreadsheet because often, the same allied families are found in those earlier locations, too.

That FAN network is VERY powerful. Almost no one went to the next frontier alone. You needed other people for survival – and you married who you saw.

In Summary

Most of us aren’t fortunate enough to find the dots already connected. Even if someone else has connected them, especially in today’s copy/paste tree-grafting world, you’ll want to check their sources and records, check the transcriptions, and do your own proof work. We will talk about the Genealogical Proof Standard in this series.

You will find the answers to your brick walls hiding in the groups of family, friends, and neighbors. Recording everything not only provides you with valuable information, now and in the future, it also keeps you from replowing the same field. You won’t have to wonder if you’ve already looked at a particular resource or if you extracted a specific surname.

Now that you know how to extract, transcribe, and record relevant records, you can begin to sift through those location records from our last article.

Our next article will be about surname searching.

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2 thoughts on “Genealogy Proof Series: Extracting and Recording Data So That You Can Find It”

  1. Roberta, Will your new book be available in the Kindle format? I prefer that over Genealogical.com’s ePub versions.

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