Making the PowerPoint Plan

It’s about 100 degrees outside and I’ve decided it’s an excellent time to begin working on an interactive PowerPoint program for showing family tree information to my Mom’s family. At times, the thought of creating this becomes overwhelming because I’m the first to admit that I’m a perfectionist with OCD tendencies. I want to make this program “entertaining”, but I also want this to be informative and even a little educational. I want my family to be able to see the information that they WANT to see and also able to skip things they don’t care to see. I have to think I may be the only one fascinated with tax records, but want to make them available in case someone else is! And maybe I can make the tax records more “interesting” by creating some type of chart showing how the number of acres owned or the number of cattle changed over time. Maybe I’ll be able to create a little map showing how the tax records show the migration from one area to another – anyway, I digress…

I want the program to be informative as far as our specific family details go, but I also want to pull in some historical references to help everyone see our family in context with the times that they lived in. Newspaper headlines from the area or snippets from local history websites would be interesting things to include. Can you see why I’m overwhelmed? So I thought I’d begin with making a plan and asking for suggestions from anyone who’s interested in following along.

First, I know I’m going to want some background images that are a little more nostalgic than the typical PowerPoint slide design offers, so I’m going to begin looking online for images and textures that I can use.  For example, my mother’s family is from the Kentucky area, so I will begin looking for images of farmland, rolling countysides and log cabins that I can use as backgrounds for a typical family tree chart or family group sheet that I might want to include. I’m also going to look for images of textures like old fashioned lace or burlap or faded denim.

My program will be using a lot of hyperlinks and triggers so that anyone can click on a name or a entry on a timeline to see the source document if they want. This program will not be a “go to the next slide please” kind of program. I’m hoping it will be something that not only lets everyone see where genealogists get their information from, but also is eye opening as far as what things they might have in their possession that they never thought I’d be interested in.

My plan is that my opening slide will be a typical family tree chart with perhaps 3 generations: my mother and her siblings, their parents and both sets of grandparents. Of course, I’d love to do more, but I think that will be PLENTY for the time being. Plus, they will all be able to relate to these people more than a name from 1780 that I just say “Trust me, they are related!” – at least until they show an interest.

From the family tree, they will be able to click on a name and the program will jump to the section for that person. This page will either be a group sheet type of thing, or a timeline with a button to see the group sheet. (The group sheet will have the similar idea of clicking on a name to jump to that section.) While the timeline COULD become very complicated and crowded, I’m thinking that I need to keep it simple. I’ll begin with the obvious stuff – birth date, marriage date and death date. Then I’ll add the birth dates for each child. If there’s room, I’ll add dates of residence locations as well. Each of these dates will also be clickable. If I have a lot of information for a certain event, clicking on the item will trigger a jump to that part of the program.  For example, clicking on the marriage date could jump to a screen that shows the marriage license or registry. If I have a document, but still have questions, I can include those questions on the side to see if anyone else happens to know the answer. If I don’t have a document, then clicking on the item will trigger an information box to appear that will tell where the information came from and perhaps show a list of  the type of document I’m looking for to help the viewer think about what type of information they might have in a closet or attic.

I’ll want to include as many photographs as I can, but the further back in time I go, the fewer photos I have. So I’m also going to try to find or create some silhouette images that might illustrate an occupation of an ancestor. Not only will images like that help to make a slide more visually appealing, it will also show immediately that I DON’T have any photos of a particular person and perhaps that will trigger a memory of a photo that someone has in an album somewhere.

Several years ago, my mother put together a booklet of stories that my grandmother had told her about growing up. There are not many stories in the booklet because my grandmother did not have a very happy childhood, but if I can incorporate those stories and try to also include some images from the area she grew up in to make the stories “come alive”, perhaps that will create a desire for my aunts and uncles to tell stories that they’ve heard so that they can be included in any updated versions of the program.

So here’s my initial “to do” list in preparation for this project.

1) Begin looking for background images – landscapes and textures.

2) Begin looking through my genealogy notes and making the topics that I want to be sure to include as well as the things that might be a little too mundane for the non-genealogists.

3) Begin collecting documents that haven’t been digitized that I want to include.

4) Begin taking digital pictures of some of the items I’ve collected that were my grandmothers.

5) Make a rough mind map of what a typical section for an individual might include.

6) Begin compiling a list of internet links to include in the program so that a person who might find this “genealogy stuff” interesting can begin doing their own research.

If you’d like to follow along and make your own program as I go, you can start collecting items too and thinking about what you’d like to include information wise. I’ll be using PowerPoint 2010 for my examples, but I think most of what I’m planning to include will be doable in older versions as well.

I’m actually starting to get excited about this project! Time to tell the family they will probably be on their own for dinner for the next few days!

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“Fresh Start” Time of Year?

The new school year is about a week and a half away and as usual, I have an overwhelming desire to have a “fresh start”.

I want to go through my closet and get rid of clothes I never wear and organize my new “school clothes” for the new year.

I want to go through all of my school files and toss and/or reorganize the paper files as well as my digital files.

I want to get out in my gardens and trim and cut my perennials (which are really hurting in the drought!) and split and rearrange them so they will be better off next spring.

AND, I want to go through my family tree database and clean it up! This is BY FAR the more overwhelming project! I’ve always had a hard time keeping my computer database up to date. I really prefer to just keep everything on Ancestry. But I see a real value in my computer database and I just upgraded to FTM 2012 specifically because it will sync with my tree on Ancestry. But it didn’t take me long to see that I’m missing pieces of information that I should have included. So now, the desire to go through each person and check those citations and add digital images and detailed notes is kicking in BIG TIME.

How can I do this in an organized manner that would not require huge chunks of time that I do not have? I can say I’m going to look at 1 person each day, for example, but how do I do that and not lose my place? There are 776 people in this branch of my tree, but they aren’t all equally researched. Should I concentrate on the individuals in my direct ancestor 5 gen chart and go numerically? Begin with my mother, then her father, then mother, then paternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, maternal grandfather, maternal grandmother, etc? Or do I modify that and work in family groups? My mother’s parents along with all of their children, then each grandparent group? If I choose that, how far down do I go? For example, I can see working on my grandparents and each of their children, but when do I work on THEIR children and grandchildren? What about the ancestor with 14 children? My mother had an uncle who had 28 children for heaven’s sake!

And what about source citations? I’m happy to have the citations as they are automatically downloaded from Ancestry, but if I want to follow Evidence Explained, should I delete all citations and start from scratch? Or modify each citation as I come to it?

After years of upgrading FTM over and over, I have some pretty strange things in the files. Notes for images that became citations of some sort. Names of children that became AKA’s for some individuals, etc. At one time, when there was only one “Notes” section per person, I had loooooong notes for each individual that were basically a timeline of events in their life. I had a note for EVERY item I could find for the individual – tax records, mentions in court records, etc. as well as questions and ideas to follow up on and those notes are totally gone from the program (but not from my computer). Should I try to put those back in?

I’d LOVE to do a totally from scratch type of thing, but is that realistic? It could be a FANTASTIC opportunity to really evaluate what I have and what I need and update my research plan and put together a “to do” list for each person, but it’s difficult enough to find “normal research” time, so would this become a project that I begin to resent?

Perhaps, I should keep my current file as a “working file” and begin a fresh file that begins from scratch. Am I shooting too high? I tend to start these grand projects which later get shelved when reality hits…

What do you think? Any suggestions?

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1940 Success!

A couple of week-ends ago, my Mom came to my house for a visit. I thought it would be cool to be able to show her the 1940 census for her family, although she would not be born for a couple of years yet.  At the time, Indiana had not been indexed, so I used the One-Step tools on the Ancestry site to find my mother’s maternal grandfather but that’s where my luck ended. When she arrived, we used our detective skills to finally find her family in a near-by county.

Ironically, the announcement came 1 week later that the Indiana index had been completed, which could have made my search much easier. At the same time, it was announced that Kentucky had also been indexed so I did a search for my mother’s paternal grandparents in Kentucky – but no luck.

I thought it would be a pretty simple search! Last name, Smith – which is pretty darn common – but their first names were Oliver and Mintie. How many could there be? Well, apparently, there were NONE.

So today, I had 30 minutes to kill and I decided to see if I could find each of the children of Oliver and Mintie thinking that they probably lived nearby one of them and it worked! They lived next door to their 3rd son. The reason I could not find them was because the names had been indexed as Alian and Misstie.

So I believe I’ve now found all of my direct ancestors that can be found in the 1940 census. I do enjoy reading the employment information and the number of hours each person worked in a week. Because of this, I’ve been doing more research into the WPA as a few of my ancestors listed their employment that way. I’m thinking of creating a spreadsheet of the different occupations of my ancestors through the years – although I believe they are overwhelmingly farmers. But you never know what you’ll find when you begin to look at your information from a different perspective.  That just may be on my “to do list” the next time I find a free 30 minutes!

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