{"id":6599,"date":"2017-05-09T07:29:16","date_gmt":"2017-05-09T11:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6599"},"modified":"2017-05-22T06:09:07","modified_gmt":"2017-05-22T10:09:07","slug":"family-history-models-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6599","title":{"rendered":"Family History Models (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Queen

Queen Victoria’s Family Tree<\/p><\/div>\n

Once you begin working on your family genealogy, there\u2019s an infinite way to organize and present it. You can keep all of it on Ancestry.com or other websites, of course, but that doesn\u2019t necessarily give you the flexibility of sending copies to family members who aren\u2019t online, taking copies to family reunions, or having a few pages with you on a scouting trip to a history center or cemetery. Taking your laptop or tablet along isn\u2019t always desirable.<\/p>\n

Last Friday\u2019s post covered general tips<\/a>, today\u2019s begins describing the wide range of ways to organize and report your genealogical findings, from the simple to the elaborate. Today and tomorrow, I\u2019ll describe five of them.<\/p>\n

Many kinds of reports can be created within the better software options<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Begats\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Some people are only interested in what I call \u201cthe begats\u201d\u2014who were the parents, the grandparents, the great-grandparents and so on. In addition to names, a genealogy organized this way often includes: dates of birth and death, date of marriage and name of bride\/groom, and, possibly burial place. (The cemetery information is valuable, because many cemetery records are now online, for individual cemeteries or collectively<\/a>, and they\u2019re another research avenue.) Your begats may be in tree form, with boxes like an organization chart or it may be text.<\/p>\n

When You Don\u2019t Know Much<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes, the choice about presentation style is dictated by the fact that you just don\u2019t know very much. That\u2019s the situation with my father\u2019s parents, who immigrated separately to the United States from Hungary before about 1910. Research on the Ellis Island website<\/a> brought up several people who might be them. Ship manifests, which provide key genealogical information, including age, home town, and place\/person they were traveling to, helped me narrow my search.<\/p>\n

The family history I prepared includes some background on the home towns of the two immigrants I believe are most likely my grandparents (about which my father\u2019s generation knew almost nothing). Whether the information I found is correct in every particular or not, reading it you get some insight into the black box of their immigration story. You can get a feel for this kind of reporting with the stories of my grandmother<\/a>, Maria Krausz, and grandfather<\/a>, Ferencz Hegyi.<\/p>\n

When You Have A Narrow Interest<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes, you have a particularly narrow interest that suggests a focus for a family report. My seven-year-old grandson asked whether any of our family fought in the Civil War. I took the Civil War chapter of the family history I\u2019ve written, revised the text to make it more suitable for a young person and added historical photographs and artworks.<\/p>\n

The finished piece (25 pages) includes transcriptions of letters from our ancestors home. Since these soldiers they indicated where they were writing from, I summarized information about their units and the battles they participated in. I also created a Civil War family tree, focusing on the combatants. Grey boxes for our Confederate ancestors, blue boxes for the Union, and red lines for soldiers who died in the war. Seven so far.<\/p>\n

Writing a complete family history is a formidable task, even for a writer like me, and much more so for non-writers. Taking a piece of it\u2014in this case the Civil War, or the Immigrant Generation, or \u201cOur Family in the Depression\u201d\u2014is for some people a manageable way to start.<\/p>\n

WEDNESDAY: Family History Models (Part 2): The More Elaborate Options<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once you begin working on your family genealogy, there\u2019s an infinite way to organize and present it. You can keep all of it on Ancestry.com or other websites, of course, but that doesn\u2019t necessarily give you the flexibility of sending … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Family History Models (Part 1) - What to do with that stack of genealogical info","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[41,266,186,104],"tags":[166,416,28],"class_list":["post-6599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genealogy","category-history","category-technology","category-the-morgue","tag-creativity","tag-real-life","tag-writers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Ir","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6599"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6601,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6599\/revisions\/6601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}