Improving My Family Tree Profiles - Historical Place Names and Narrative Sketches

While I have written over 500 genealogical sketches of my ancestors back through the 7th great-grandparents (well, most of them - see 52 Ancestors/Relatives Biographies), I still have almost 2,000 known ancestors from earlier times.  I have family relationships (parents, spouses, children, etc.), research notes, events, and sources for most of them in the RootsMagic (now Version 10) family tree management desktop software program I use, but most of the profiles of these early ancestors have two significant flaws:

• I have not used "historical place names" for localities where the people resided - my standard has always been to use "current place names" so that they appear on the map in RootsMagic. 

• I have not included a complete list of the events, parents, spouses, children and sources that I have used to document these earlier ancestors in the "Person General Notes" in RootsMagic.

1)  I'm working to convert the current place names to historical place names when appropriate (e.g., "Medfield, Norfolk, Massachusetts, United States" is the current plance name, but before 1776 the historical place name was "Medfield, Suffolk, Massachusetts Bay Colony, British Colonial America").  

This will be a long slog because I have over 73,000 persons in my database, and 10,000 or more of them were living after 1620 and before 1776.  I have resisted doing this for 20 years or more (because then I had over 40,000 person profiles), and I decided I should do this now rather than do it later (later may come sooner than I hope).

This is a task that needs to be performed for a lot of profiles, and I am doing a hundred or more profiles a week as time allows.  So far, I have done it for ancestors, and not siblings/spouses of my ancestors.  Realistically, I will never finish this task because of the volume of conversions needed.

As an example, here is the "Family View" on the "People" menu in RootsMagic for the John Hubbard (1630-1702) family:

You can see that the birth, marriage and death locations are in "current place name" form.  Here is the Person Profile page for John Hubbard (1630-1702) after I converted the events to "historical place names," and showing the "General Person Note" on the right side of the screen:

I have very few source citations on the screen above - I need to do more research on this person and add events, sources and media, and eventually a genealogical sketch.  

2)  To create a more complete list of the events, parents, spouses, children and sources I have started creating a "Narrative Report" for one generation in RootsMagic for the family, based on the "current thinking" and state of my research.  

Here is the created Narrative Report for John Hubbard (1630-1702) in RootsMagic:

I save this report to my RootsMagic Report files as a text file, and then copy and paste the information to the top of the "Person General Note" in RootsMagic, so it looks like this:

The value here is that I didn't have to type any of this again - over time I have input information and edited it - and can let RootsMagic do the job.  

I do edit the resulting "Person General Note" slightly: if I know the parents of the persons, I add that to the Note;  At the end of the added narrative and sources list (not shown above) I add a heading for "========== RESEARCH NOTES  =============" to set them apart from the narrative report in the "Person General Note."

The entire task here takes 10 minutes at most, unless I actually do more research, add more events and sources, etc.  

3)  If I live long enough, I can do more research, add more sources, and create a genealogical sketch with historical place names for each person.   I will have to update the "Person General Note" but that is not a difficult task to do.

The profiles, the notes, and the sources are still imperfect - they will never be perfect - but at least the ancestor profiles will be consistent and reflect the level of research that I've found and conducted.  

4)  Have you used or converted your locality names to "historical place names?"  Have you written a narrative report for each ancestor?  If so, please tell us your process.  

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