Thursday, May 7, 2015

Dealing with Information Overload - Russ Worthington's Presentation

I just finished watching Russ Worthington's presentation to a Washington DC Family History Center audience on 2 May 2015 - it is on YouTube and you can watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYLgdmNO0PI, or start it below:



In this presentation, which DearMYRTLE produced, you can learn about Russ's research process, including:

*  Use of the Research Overview chart
*  The Record Selection Table from  https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/United_States_Record_Selection_Table
*  The Resource Checklist from  https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Resource_Checklist
*  Record Links (see Russ's spreadsheet)
*  Person Check List (see Russ's spreadsheet)
*  Research Log Form (see Russ's spreadsheet)

Russ's spreadsheet with all of these sheets is at http://bit.ly/CousinRussResearchSheets.  If you want to be better organized in order to deal with Information Overload, I recommend this spreadsheet.


There are sheets for each of the itemized subjects above at the bottom of the spreadsheet above.

Russ has found it useful to find Ancestry Leaf Hints in a specific database for persons in his Ancestry Member Tree.  He can mine each specific database for all of the Hints for persons in his AMT, and  add events, source citations and media to his Family Tree Maker genealogy database.  This is very efficient since the same master source citation can be used until the Hints are exhausted for the database.  

In the presentation, Russ describes how he uses the Research Log and To-Do Item features built into the Family Tree Maker 2014 genealogy program.  For every Hint that he finds for a person in his Ancestry Member Tree, he adds the information to his Research Log for the person.  He adds other research items that he finds from his daily research efforts to his To-Do List so he can perform the task noted efficiently.

You can see how Russ, and I, do the searching a specific Ancestry database by reading my blog post Tuesday's Tip - Search Ancestry.com Hints by Record Collection (27 January 2015) and watching the demonstration in the YouTube video highlighted in my blog post Demonstrating Adding Ancestry.com Hints in a Specific Database to my RootsMagic Database (30 October 2014) which is part of the DearMYRTLE Wacky Wednesday series.

I enjoyed watching Russ's 60 minute presentation, and I recommend it for your viewing if the subject is of interest to you.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/05/dealing-with-information-overload-russ.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.


1 comment:

Cousin Russ said...

Randy,

Thank you for your kind words. It was a fun project and the process I described is working very well for me.

Russ