From DEAD FRED:
The #1 Best-Selling Genealogy Reference Book Of All Time (at DeadFred.com)!
“It’s a great book! I have found resources that I didn’t know about, and I’ve been ‘tinkering’ with family history research for a lot of years. I use it all of the time.”
~Robert D. White
Finally, you can kiss brick walls goodbye.
One of my former theories about how to do things was this. I decided that anyone put into my database without a ‘proper’ source – birth, death or marriage certificate, military record, census record, etc, should have no source at all. Surely not a ‘descendants of’ chart from some other collector who probably got it from some other collector. I still like that idea because it keeps me from getting complacent with my research.
Can you find anything in your Master Sources list?
When I had 200 sources I could. Now I’ve got 1,100 and if I hadn’t categorized everything I’d be lost. The census records are self-explanatory but nothing else is.
This cleaning up frenzy I’m into can’t last forever – well, maybe it can.
No, I haven’t dropped off the face of the Earth. Following my own advice, I finished my first Passage Express project. 740 MB of charts and chapters and photos and slideshows and maps. Then some relatives came calling. Then the sun turned to rain and I’ve turned into a squirrel preparing for winter. A large pot of home-made soup on the stove as I speak.
Speaking of squirrels – Years ago I used to bring newspapers and magazines into my house. I don’t know why. They just looked interesting, I guess. First I had to make space for them, and that’s not easy here so I was constantly moving the ever-growing pile. Then I found myself distressed with the pressure of having to read them and never having enough time. But I kept bringing home more. It took me forever to realize the simple solution – STOP bringing them home. So I stopped.
