How to Manually Transfer Your Sources From Ancestry.com to Your Genealogy Program (Quickly)

It's been many months since I first decided that I wanted to manually transfer my sources from Ancestry.com to my genealogy program of choice, Legacy family tree. When I first started my transferring, Family Tree Maker was still actively supporting transfers of information from Ancestry.com to their program and now RootsMagic has introduced support. Yet, I still decided to manually transfer. There were quite a few reasons for my decision to manually reenter the information, but I'll just list the main ones:

1. Ancestry.com has abysmal sources for a lot of their documents in my opinion. In most cases the only halfway decent ones are censuses, and oftentimes I will find the auto-sourcing they do has incorrect values for fields like page numbers.
2. I want everything in my local tree to be as accurate as possible. When I first started working on my tree I was, let's face it, not especially concerned with accuracy. By going through each record individually I can check each record individually.
3. I can save source images to my local file. These aren't for anything other than my own personal reference, as it is not at all legal or encouraged to distribute these images (they are the property of ancestry), but if I ever need to cancel my subscription I can still glean information from them.
4. My tree on ancestry is not mine. I collaborate on it with my great uncle Van Wert (who did extensive work even before records were available online!). So even if I wanted to I wouldn't be able to download everything (which worked out for me in the end). 
5. Name recognition. When you force yourself to really read the records, you will begin to see the same names over and over. Name recognition has been crucial for me in finding immigrant ancestors, as its not abnormal for the names you see over and over to be family from overseas.

Writing Master Source Names in Legacy Family Tree

I recently realized that I really needed to start getting my Master sources straight. The Source Writer is the main reason why I love Legacy Family tree. It makes writing high quality sources super easy and fast. However, family files will very quickly accumulate a large number of master sources in a very short amount of time. That's why organizing them and coming up with naming conventions is so important, which is what I will show you how to do today.

This is what my sources look like currently. As you can see they are not really organized and the naming conventions vary from source to source. You'll notice that none of my sources are person-specific. That is just personal preference; I use each master source dozens of times for multiple people to save time.

The first thing I will do is come up with naming conventions. The exact format I prefer is: "Date RecordType State/Country County Website". After renaming all of my master sources for the 1910 census, this is what it looks like:

As you can see I have used star signs, dash marks, and parenthesis to separate the record type, location, and source website from each other. I think this increases readability and makes it easier to immediately spot the one you are looking for.

This format organizes the master sources in a very specific way:

1. It sorts your sources by date
2. It then organizes further by the type of record
3. Next it sorts by either the state or country it is in. You want the state first so that all the Master Sources for that state and date stay by each other. Otherwise it will organize alphabetically by the county
4. It organizes alphabetically based on the original website the master source is for.

Let me know in the comments how you organize your sources, or tell me how this method works out for you!

How to track Twins in Legacy Family Tree

As many of you may know, the tendency of mothers to have fraternal twins is a genetic one. Fraternal twins run in nearly all lines of my family tree. In fact, I am one myself! I recently decided to start tracking these twins using Legacy Family Tree and decided to share the steps to do this.

There are 2 main options for tracking twins in Legacy Family Tree. The first is by marking their 'child status' as a twin. I will show the steps for this using my great grandmother, Lillian Penas, and her twin sister, Helen Penas.

First, navigate to the "family view" of the person you wish to mark as a twin.

The family view for Lillian Penas

Writing a Biography Part One: Research and Citations

When I first started doing genealogy I knew that my goal would ultimately be to write biographies for as many of my ancestors (and their families) as possible. After lots of trial, error, and research I have finally begun this process. My next several posts will be a series that will go in depth on every step I now follow when writing these biographies.

Step one: Organizing Research and Preparing Citations

This is, of course, the most important step. It's important to have documentation that supports your facts; it prevents mistakes and false assumptions from being made and allows anyone reading the biography to reference back to the original sources and verify your information. I personally use Legacy Family Tree software to organize everything. It has a very organized system for citations that makes it fairly simple to add meaningful and useful sources to your work.

Take, for example, this newspaper article: