timbratcher.com

ABBREVIATIONS:

I have used the following abbreviations in my database:

ARR means that additional research is required.  This means that I am missing something, unsure of something, or have some additional thoughts about something that I need to follow up on.

PV means Peary Vincent, the third husband of my great aunt.  He and several others put together a family history book on the Vincent side of my family, and I used it as the foundation of my Vincent research.  When I cite to this work, I refer to it as PV.

FTS, FDC, and FSSDI are indications of where I have obtained certain information or data.  FTS means "from tombstone."  FDC means "from Death Certificate."  FSSDI means "from the Social Security Death Index."

 GENERATIONS:

When I first started building my database, I quickly discovered that it was next to impossible to keep, for example, the ten to fifteen James Vincents straight.  Granted, there are certain ways to distinguish them (e.g., year of birth, parents, etc.), but I ran into many situations where I did not have much of the information necessary to keep them distinct.  I settled on a "generation" system, where I arbitrarily assigned myself to Generation N, and then indexed everyone else off me.  My parents are M's.  My grandparents are L's.  And so on.  This has been very, very helpful in trying to connect the disparate branches of my family tree, and it has forced me to make sure that I am inserting a person in the right location in the tree.  There are, however, difficulties involved. 

The first difficulty is that a person my be related to me in more than one way.  Setting aside the obvious jokes about my Kentucky roots, there are very real instances where a person is my relative by blood and his or her spouse is related to me by both that marriage and by a bloodline in his or her own right.  It took a while to figure out how to indicate this in my database, but I have now settled on the following approach:  I use both generations.  If, for example, a person is related by blood in one generation but related by marriage or blood in a different generation down a different branch, I might call his or her generation "L/M," meaning, by blood the person is an L and by marriage an M.

The second difficulty with my generations system stems from knowing a person is related to me, while not having enough information to know how so.  In these cases, I use a temporary X generation as a placeholder until I manage to connect them with the proper generation designation.  So, if you see Gen X, then you know I just haven't connected that person to my tree . . . yet.