Working It Wednesday – Comparing Others

Last time, I talked about how I was going to start comparing “others” who are mentioned in my ancestors’ records.  Specifically, the names that are mentioned in deed records.  Those names appear in the part of the deed that I tend to glance over without really reading because the handwriting is difficult to read and what could I possible gain from knowing that there was a black oak tree on the corner of Joe Smith’s property?

So I decided to make a form for my Genealogy Planner.  It isn’t anything complicated, anyone could make it.  I just created a table in Word and then added my ivy design on the top, but I thought I’d put it here on anyway for anyone who might want it. To add more rows, put your cursor on any cell in the bottom row and then click on “insert above” in the “Layout” tab.

Others Info

As I’ve been working on putting my chart together, I did decide that it would be good to inlcude “others” from all types of records on the same form. So I’ll be including neighbors in census records and witnesses on marriage documents or guardianship records.  Perhaps I could also include people listed who made purchases at estate sales, but that could be quite a list, so I’m not sure.  At the very least, I could use my chart to see if those people are more likely to be neighbors instead of family.  It’s a work in progress!  And I have noticed that although I’ve been focusing so strongly on getting correct citations into my database and group sheets, I have not been NEARLY as diligent on labeling the actual pages in my files!  I’ve been looking at deed records where I made sure to include the page number in the copy, but no where did I write down which deed book the record came from.  When will I learn??

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Working It Wednesday – Image Effects

I’ve mentioned before that I like to add images to my notes that I keep using Word.  Usually, these are scaled down or cropped versions of census records or a birth record or a photo of a tombstone.  If I’m lucky, I have a picture of the person who is the focus of the notes.  But recently, I’ve decided that I’d also like to add images of objects or people that would be relevant to the time period for that person.  For example, I plan to add pictures of the president at that time or images of the area the person lived in.  But sometimes, I only have a picture of something that’s a modern version of what I’m looking for.  Maybe I know my grandmother grew up in a log cabin, but I don’t have a picture of THAT log cabin because it burned down when she was a teenager.  I’d like to have something to show what it was probably like, so I do a Google Images search and I find this.

I like the look and size of the cabin and I like the hanging pot outside, but it’s just too modern looking because of the modern house in the background and because of the brick sidewalk leading up to the house.  And I’d prefer to have something that looks like a sketch of her cabin to add to my notes.  (Which SOMEDAY will be like an illustrated book that I’ll pass on to my family…)  I’m going to use what little I know (just enough to be dangerous) of Photoshop along with a cool program that I found online.  First, I’ll use Photoshop to get rid of the modern house behind the cabin.  I don’t need this to look like a professional did it, just enough to make it look like trees in the background in a pencil sketch.  So I open the image in Photoshop and I click on the “Clone” icon.

After clicking on that, the cursor turns into a circle.  You can adjust the size of the circle by pressing Ctrl + or Ctrl – until it is the size you can work with easily.  Place the cursor in the area you’d like to copy, making sure that you have room to move around a little bit.  Whatever this circle touches is going to be copied onto another area of the photo.  When you have your cursor placed, then click Alt while clicking the left button on the mouse.  A small “bullseye” will appear when you do this.  Now move the cursor to the area you’d like to change.  Whenever you hold you mouse button down, the area that you originally chose will be copied over the image.  You can move your cursor around on the image (while holding down the mouse button) and the bullseye will move the same amount and direction – so your mouse is moving your original bullseye at the same time it is copying it onto a new area.  Again, I don’t need this to look like a professional did it (and it doesn’t, believe me!) I just want it to look like trees in the background.  You can change the location of the area that will be cloned as many times as necessary just by placing your cursor where you want and clicking Alt left button on mouse and then continuing on.  It’s fun to play around and see what can be done.  If you need to work in a very small area, zoom in on the image and make your cursor smaller.  Here’s my new image without the modern house.

The modern house has been covered with a copy of the trees on the right.

I save this image as a .jpg and then I’m ready to take it online.  There is a great (and free!) site at www.anymaking.com that allows you to upload a photo and make it look old, or make it into a puzzle or other fun things.  I really enjoy the pencil drawing effect.  Click on that button.  You may have to scroll down a bit to get past the ad that shows up at the top.  Click on the box that says “Upload Image” and then let the program work it’s magic.  After you see the image, you can adjust how dark the pencil marks are and how slanted they are.  You can also make a color image into a black and white image, if you’d like.  Here’s my log cabin after the conversion.

I chose to go with a black and white version to hide the brick sidewalk.  I’ve used this same technique to take words off of T-shirts before making a pencil sketch of my kids.  I put them in frames for family and they look great!  It hides alot of photo issues like faded colors or blemishes on faces.  For older photos, I can use this to do a quick fix on creases in photos before turning them into sketches.  It’s a nice effect that I enjoy using and I hope you will too!

Next Wednesday, I’m going to show how to put the images into Word and have them stay where you want them, plus a few effects you can do to your image from Word.

Working It Wednesday – Adding an Image to a Document Part 1

Sometimes, when I read through my notes for an individual or family, I tend to forget that they were actual people and not data in a chart.  It helps if I can add their image to my notes.

Other times, my notes are full of information, which may or may not be cited, but I lose track of whether the information comes from an actual document or from a transcript of the document.  I like to add thumbnail images to my notes to remind me of exactly what I have.

This week, I’ll talk about resizing and cropping an image.  Next week, I’ll talk about different effects that could be applied to an image and then I’ll go over how to place the image into your document.

I rarely have the space to include a full sized image in my document, so I usually need to scale the image down.  I love to use Photoshop for this, but I thought I’d go through the steps using Paint since most computers come with the program already installed.

In my folder of images, I begin by right clicking on the image and telling it to open with the Paint program.  (You can also open the file from the Paint program, but I like seeing the image before opening it to make sure it’s the image I’m thinking of.)  The image will probably be too large to see the whole thing on my screen.  So I begin by resizing the image.

In the toolbar in the top left corner, I click “Resize” or click “Ctrl W”.

On previous versions of Paint, I believe you had to click on the Image tab and then choose Stretch/Skew in the drop down menu.  From here, you choose the percentage you want to shrink the image.  I usually begin with 50%.  (Note that you can choose different percentages for horizontal and vertical, but that would distort the image.)

If I need to reduce it further, I repeat the steps.

If I shrink the image too far, I usually “undo” by hitting “Ctrl Z” rather than trying to resize it to a larger percentage.  It doesn’t have to be the exact size that I’ll have in the document, just small enough to paste into the image without it being larger than the paper size. The image can be further adjusted within the document later.

I can also crop a photo to contain a specific part of the image.  This could be a single person from a group photo or it could be a line or two from a full page record.  To crop a portion, begin by clicking the down arrow under the “Select” button.  In the drop down menu, click “Rectangular Selection”.

Once you have drawn the box around the section you’d like to keep, click the “Crop” button at the top and everything that is not in your rectangle will disappear.

Once you have the image resized and cropped, be sure to save it with a different name or you will have lost the original image.

Next week, I’ll go over some fun effects you can use with your photos.

Timeline in Excel – Part 3

Adding Callouts

Callouts are like thought balloons in a comic.  There are various designs for call-outs including starbursts, clouds and rectangles.  You can also add various effects to make them look three dimensional or tilted, etc.  The nice thing about callouts is that you can adjust the line coming out of the shape to point to an exact spot – in my case, to the date on the Date Bar.  To add a callout:

• From the Insert tab at the top, click on “Shapes” and then select the Callout shape you’d like from the choices.
  
• I chose a rectangle to keep it simple.  Draw the callout by clicking and dragging the mouse into the desired dimensions.  You can type your text immediately and then adjust the size of the callout to fit the text and the look you are going for.
  
• The yellow diamonds on the callout line allow you to adjust the line to point to the exact point on the timeline that you’d like by clicking and dragging the line wherever you’d like.
  
• Each callout can be formatted with color and other effects to bring attention to specific details.  For example, I chose colors for my callouts that match the colors I chose in the location bar to quickly show which county the fact was from. You can add effects by selecting “Shape Fill” under the Format tab.
  
• You can add as many effects as you’d like to make the timeline look as 3-D or as simple as you’d like.
  
• After you have inserted all of your callouts, some of the lines may be in front of the boxes.  To fix this, click on the callout and then under the “Format” tab, click on “Send to Back”.
  

There is no end to the number of effects you can add to your timeline.  For myself, spending time working on the timeline sometimes brings details into focus or shows me new areas to research.  It can show me areas where I’m making wrong assumptions and because I can add information for other family members as well, it can consolidate information in a way that makes sense visually as opposed to my notes which are filed by individual families.

I’d love to hear ideas of other things to include on a timeline!

Timeline in Excel – Part 2

Create a Location Bar

I decided that above my Date Bar, I’d make a simple Location Bar to show which County/State my ancestor was living in through the years.

• Select a row for your Location Bar.  (Row 4)  It should be a row that is high enough to enter the information you’d like.  I wanted to enter a date range and a location.
• Using the Date Bar as a guide, follow the same steps as for the Date Bar to create the Location Bar.  I merged cells that would have been the date range for a specific location.  For example, I have information that says my ancestor was born around 1813 in North Carolina.  The next location record I have for him is an 1840 census in Mississippi.  So I merged cells to cover 1813 – 1840.  Because I don’t know if he moved during that time, I put 1813 – ? and North Carolina.
• Merge appropriate cells across the time range until all locations are entered.
• Again, you can border each cell.  I chose to put a border on the top and bottom and then I used color to indicate if there was a question as to how long he lived in a certain location.  As a minimum, I suggest doing each location in a different color so it is easy to see when your ancestor moved.  To fill in color:

• • Highlight the cell(s) and click the icon for fill color.
  • You can choose one of the theme colors or you can click on “more colors” to choose from a color wheel of sorts.
  • You can also choose to add a texture or effect to convey information.  Because I don’t know exactly when my ancestor moved from North Carolina to Mississippi, I chose to add a gradient effect to make the color gradually fade out.  This reminds me to keep my timeframe for research flexible.

• • • To make a special effect with your coloring:  Right-click in the cell you will be formating and choose “Format Cell”.
      
    • Under the “Fill” tab, click on “Fill Effects”
      
    • There are various choices here.  You can select your color or colors at the top and you can choose different shading styles at the bottom.  Look at the different options and then click on the box with the desired design.   Because I knew a specific date that my ancestors WAS in a location but didn’t know when he moved from that location, I chose to start my box with solid coloring that gradually fades out.
      
• I used the same steps to also add a Location Bar for my ancestor’s father directly above his Location Bar.

That can show me areas that I may not have considered searching before because all I had in my group sheet was a date and location.  For example, census records say that William Stephens was born around 1813 in North Carolina.  But William’s father, Welcome’s timeline shows that he is listed in the tax records of Adair Co, Kentucky in 1812.  So either William was born in Kentucky, or he was born before 1812.  If he was born before 1812, then I might search in Buncombe Co, NC, where Welcome was located in the 1810 census.  A good researcher already is looking at this, but seeing it in a visual format keeps it in the front of my mind – not jumbled in with all of the dates and locations in my mind as I’m looking at group sheets.

Coming next time – adding Call Outs to show additional information.

Working It Wednesday – Timeline in Excel (Part 1)

As my school year gets closer to the end, my days become more and more hectic.  Students who are struggling are finally asking for help after school.  And my students have to pass the state test given at the end of the school year in order to graduate, so that means creating extra practice problems for that.  Bottom line is, I don’t have as much time to get to the library to research as I “normally” do.  (But summer is coming, PTL!) So I use my spare minutes here and there to update my notes and files and to think of ways to make my research more visual because I am a very visual person.

Keeping on with my Excel series, I decided to think of my Excel Group Sheets sort of like my “research wall”.  I don’t have to keep all of the information within a certain image size since I’m not printing it, (although I could print the group sheet only by printing page 1 only) so I can put all kinds of information in the worksheet and scroll to whatever section has the information I’m looking for.  Last week, I showed how to use comments as post-it notes.  This week, I’ve decided to add a timeline to help me zero in on the most likely locations to look for records for my ancestors.

I did a search online for a timeline template and found one that I think is incredible at http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelArticles/create-a-timeline.html, but while I loved the way it looks, I think it would take a pretty advanced Excel user to modify it in any way (like having it show up next to my group sheet).  I’m not looking for something that gives me MORE work to do, but a timeline that uses the very basic skills of Excel.  Knowing how to do these things are all that are required to make my timeline.

• Highlight a column
• Adjust the width of a column
• Merge cells
• Format cells (left justified, top or bottom, centered, etc.)
• Add color to cells
• Add call outs and adjust their size and shape.

These are the steps to make a replica of my timeline using Excel 2007.  I believe everything I do in 2007 can be done with earlier versions except some of the color gradients.  I also know that a lot of personalizing can be done to the task bar, so yours may not look exactly like mine in the images.

Due to length, I’m going to make this a multi-part posting.

Choose the location for your timeline.

Because I can’t change the width of columns A-I without changing my group sheet, I decided to put my timeline to the right of my group sheet.  I’ve removed my comment balloons for my illustration photos, but I left a couple of columns between my group sheet and my timeline to leave space for those.  So my timeline begins at Column L.  I also had to consider which row had the height that I wanted to use for my timeline bar.  I wanted to have notations above and below and I wanted a row that was high enough to read my dates.  I chose Row 6.  I plan to put timelines with different information above my date bar, so I wanted to be near the bottom of several rows with the same height.  I also wanted to add call-outs below the tame bar, so the thinner rows below Row 6 were good for that.

Format your columns:

I wanted to be able to indicate specific years for items on my timeline, but I didn’t want to take the space to type every year at the top of each column.  So I adjusted my columns to be very small and then merged the cells in the timeline bar to groups of 5.

• Decide where you want your timeline bar.  Remember, you can’t adjust the height of the top 40 rows or it will alter the height in your group sheet.  (Mine is Row 6)
• Highlight several columns (for mine, I highlighted columns L-P)
  • Clicking and hold your cursor on letter L at the top of the column and then drag your cursor to the last letter before releasing your click.
    
• Right click on one of these columns and choose “column width” and adjust the width.  I chose a width of 1.
• Instead of trying to highlight 100 columns, I only adjusted 5 or so and then clicked on one of the letters in the center and then clicked on “insert” over and over until I had the number of thin columns that I needed.  Every inserted column has the same width as the column to the right.
  

Create the Date Bar

• On the Date Bar row (Row 6), highlight the first 5 cells of the date bar. (Column L – P).  Right click that area and select “format cells”.  Under the alignment tab, select “merge cells”.
  
• Type in the date you’d like in the box.  In my tool bar, I told it to left justify and put it at the bottom of the cell.  You can also italicize or choose a different font for different looks.
• Repeat the last two steps working your way across the bar until all of the relevant dates are included.
• Highlight the entire Date Bar and select a fill color.
  • You can also add borders around each cell, or across the top and bottom – whatever you’d like for the look you’d prefer.

Your Timeline should now look similar to this.

Next time – Creating a Location Bar

Working It Wednesday – Using Excel Comments as Digital Post-Its!

This is something new I started using this week and I think it’s going to be a great asset in my research!

Several years ago, I fell in love with a free program called Fototagger.  (http://www.fototagger.com/)  I used it to identify people in photos or to add information about locations and such.  I especially loved to use it with newspaper clippings – specifically for obituaries.  I could add little balloons around an image to point to specific pieces of data and add information that I knew.  For example, in a list of survivors, I could add balloons with birth/death dates, relationship to deceased, corrections to information, questions to follow up on, etc.  If another researcher had the Fototagger software on their computer, they could see my balloons and add information and send it back.  If a person didn’t have the software, they would see the original image, but no balloons.  I absolutely loved the program!  BUT, when I upgraded my laptop to use Vista, the program caused my computer to shut down any time I opened an image, whether I had used it with Fototagger or not.  I checked the web site several times for updates, but it didn’t appear that anything had been done with the program for quite awhile and I had to stop using it.

This week, I decided to see about creating my own version of this using Excel and it’s ability to add comments.  This is my first time using comments with my genealogy stuff, so I may eventually find more uses for this, but I’m excited with what I’ve come up with so far.  Here is an image of one of my group sheets with no comments. (Click on the image to see a larger version in another window.)

Because I know I’ll want to have comments on both sides of my chart, I’ll add columns to the left side.  I can change the width of the columns if needed to give me more room.

If I have a question or comment (or source citation, since I can’t add those to Excel like I do in Word) I can add a comment that shows up in a balloon next to the cell I click on.  To do this, click on the cell and then under the “Review” tab, click “New Comment”.  The balloon shows up with the cursor in place to type my comment.  I can always go back and change the comment just like I would for any text.

 

When the balloons pop up, they are directly to the right of the cell – which means that at times, the balloon is right in the middle of my chart.

I can move the balloon to any part of the page I’d like, change the size of the balloon and have a line point to the piece of information I’m referring to. To move the balloon, put your cursor along the edge of the balloon until the cursor becomes a cross.  Click on the balloon and move it wherever you’d like.  To change the size of the balloon, place your cursor on one of the corners or center of an edge.  The cursor become a double arrow.  Click and drag the box into any size you’d like.

I like these balloons for source citations, follow up questions, “to do lists”, information on other researchers I’m sharing info with or why I think information might be wrong.  I can then email my file to other researchers who can see my questions and comments and then add their own before emailing it back.  With one click of the button, I can hide individual comments or all of the comments.  Small red triangles remain in the upper right corner of any cell that has a comment.  The comments do not show up in the print out (or at least I haven’t found a way to make them show up.)

I think I’m most excited about leaving post-it notes behind!  Adding comments to my pages as soon as I think of things will help keep my thoughts organized in the midst of the dozens of interruptions that I experience every day!

Working It Wednesday – Using Word to Translate Foreign Documents

I took French in high school, but last summer, when I was researching one of my husband’s line from Alsace, I had access to an avalanche of records – none of which I could read!  Not only because of my incredibly rusty French skills, but also because of the “interesting” handwriting!  However, I found a great tool in Word that helped me tremendously!

I began by typing out the document just as I thought it looked.  I did not take the time to check spelling or format, I just typed what I thought each word looked like.  I left underlines for words that I absolutely could not decipher.

After typing it out, I clicked on the “Review” tab at the top and then on the “Set Language” button in the proofing box.  I have this set to “detect language automatically”, but you can also tell it the specific language to use.

Once Word has detected the language I am writing in, the squiggly lines appear to show which words are misspelled. I can right click on the words that are obviously names and tell the computer to “Add to Dictionary” to eliminate some of the squiggly lines.   When I right click on the remaining words, a list of suggested spellings will appear.  I use those suggestions to compare with the actual documents to see which one looks the most like what I’m seeing.  This often opens my eyes to accent marks or other ways to see letters that I hadn’t considered the first time.

Another tool that helps is the “Translation ScreenTip” tool.  Click on this and select “English”.

Then when I place my cursor over a word, the English translation will appear above the word.  This can be useful when I am deciding which word to go with from the suggested list I saw from my misspelled words.  I can select a word from the list, then place my cursor on it to see the translations.  Often, this immediately tells me that I’ve made the wrong choice.  These dictionary entries often include phrases in the foreign language that can help me with words immediately before or after the word I’m hovering over.

Once I’ve adjusted as many words as I reasonably can, I can tell Word to translate what I’ve typed.  I can translate one sentence at a time, or the entire document.  Sometimes, smaller sections are easier.  To translate my document, I begin by highlighting the section I want to translate.

At the top of the screen is the “Translate” button.  Once that is clicked, a smaller window opens at the right side of the screen.  The translation shows up in the middle of this window.

This translation often shows me words that are definitely wrong so I can try again.  Then, I like to highlight the translation, copy it, and add it to the bottom of my Word document.  Then I have my French version followed by my English version.

The more documents I translate, the more I begin to see patterns in the letters or the wording.  Each document becomes more accurate and I can go back and change earlier documents to reflect what I’ve learned.

Oh, how I love modern technology!  I’m sure that my limited knowledge of French did help me a bit, but I do feel like I could use this with other languages to at least figure out the key words of any document.

Working It Wednesday – Hyperlinking my notes

Last week, I showed how I use hyperlinking to help me quickly switch between the Group Sheets that I’ve created within Excel.  This week, I’ll show other uses for hyperlinking – this time in my notes that I write in Word.

In a nutshell, hyperlinking allows me to see any record, map or web site that I mention in my notes.  It helps me to find files that I’ve saved on my computer without having to go to my filing cabinet to find my paper copy – which means I have all of my files with me wherever I go.

Each of the hyperlinks in the page above will take me directly to the item mentioned with a single click.  Here are some examples: (Click on the image to see a larger version.)

Some things I can link to:

• Notes and Group Sheets of other individuals
• Full sized versions of thumbnail images I’ve included in my notes
• Maps
• Scanned documents
• Photographs
• Web sites where records were found
• Search screens for Ancestry, Footnote, World Vital Records, etc
• Search results for Worldcat.org or other library sites
• County Genealogy Sites
• Googlemaps
• Documents I’ve created to organize information on this surname

For me, this is extremely effective.  It’s a timesaver over locating a record that has been added to a paper stack on my desk and reminds me of documents that I have had for awhile that might not come to mind immediately.  It also cuts down on the “clutter” that I assemble on my desk while researching!

Working It Wednesday – Linking Group Sheets

I have group sheets written in Excel – which I love.  But I’ve moved more to group sheets written in Word because I love the ability write my citations easily and to keep them well organized.  But since my group sheets in Word are sized to fit in my planner, I do still use my Excel group sheets when I want to print a full sized version for my folders and binders.

My focus lately has been completely on my Stephens line.  I’ve been working on 4 generations of Stephens families who scattered near and far and I get so frustrated with the number of William’s in each family!  A man has a son named William and he and most of his siblings name a son William as well! They also tended to continue the tradition so before long, I’m looking at these different group sheets with Williams all over the place and I get confused on the relationships between them all.  I ended up taping my group sheets to the wall so that I can see them all to find how each William is related! How much easier it is to look at a group sheet, click on a name, and go directly to HIS group sheet without searching the wall!  Hyperlinks allow me to do this.  I can link to group sheets for any name on the group sheet – siblings, wives or parents.

This is convenient because the more group sheets I make in the Excel workbook, the more clicking I need to do to find the tab for the sheet I’d look to look at next.  I have 22 group sheets in this particular workbook and to quickly switch back and forth between two group sheets that don’t happen to be next to each other on my tabs can be a bit of a pain.  By hyperlinking my group sheets, I can switch quickly to any group sheet that I’d like.  Here are the steps for linking group sheets in the same Excel Workbook.

For my example, I will show my group sheet for Andrew J. Stephens and his wife, Lucy Stephens.

Let’s say that I want to make a link to Andrew’s son-in-law, William George.  First I will right-click on the cell with William’s name.

A list of options will appear.  I will click on “Hyperlink”.

A box of choices will appear.  Since I want to link to an Excel page within this workbook, I will be sure to choose the “Place in this document” selection on the left and then a list of my various group sheets will appear in the larger box on the right.  I will find William George in my list and double click.

Now William’s name in the original group sheet is “hypertext blue” and I know that if I put my cursor over William’s name, the cursor will become a hand. When I click, I will go directly to his group sheet.  (If I want to edit the text in the box, as long as the cursor is not a hand, I can click on the cell and edit the text.) From William’s group sheet, I can then make a hyperlink for his wife, Elizabeth and it would bring me right back to the group sheet I started from.  I can hyperlink any name in my group sheet to move directly to their group sheet. Handy!

Next week, I’ll write about other ways that I use hyperlinking in my genealogy work.