Jesse
Warren Ball & Cynthia Ann Alford [my 2nd great grand aunt] lived
in Mississippi and raised a large family. How large was that family and who
were the children? I think I have made sense of the data and figured that out.
I
found an Ancestry Tree that showed nine children. I wanted to verify those
children so I started to check US Census reports. I quickly had pages of
confusing notes. I started a new paper by folding it in fourths giving me four
long columns, one for the Ancestry tree and one for each census year, and
things began to come clear. Then I began an excel spreadsheet. Adding colors
made it even clearer. I think I have the children sorted out.
Jessie Warren Ball
1808 – after
1870
&
Cynthia Ann Alford
1820 MS –
between 1860 & 1870
Anyone else like using spread sheets to sort data?
I will check out 1880 as well. Hopefully, I am getting these children sorted out correctly.
Based on your charts I would say the on-line tree needs some work. I used somthing similiar to sort out the cChildren of Epps Rivers Brown abd his wife Dorinda Adair.
ReplyDeleteCharlie, I think if an online tree is unsourced it should be used as a starting point and not used as a source in itself.
DeleteI love spreadsheets too, Colleen. I find them especially useful for listing church records, identifying patterns in the names, addresses, sponsors, etc., to find sibling/cousin relationships. This approach has helped me go back a generation more than once.
ReplyDeleteDara, good ideas for using spread sheets! They clarify data for me.
DeleteI also use spreadsheets (create my own) to help sort through the many children ancestral couples of mine had. It's a useful way to track similarly named children through baptism, marriage, and burial records.
ReplyDeleteYvonne, thanks for stopping by my blog. I agree that spreadsheets are useful to organize data. I enjoy working with them.
ReplyDelete