To address your cogent points, I soon realized that the VRs in the published town records mainly came from the town clerks records, so I started reading them and found many nuggets, and not a few errors in the published VRs.

Then on to land and probate records, which I am still collecting and abstracting. I have completed my 200+ Middlesex County MA ancestors’ probate records (the FHL films are of the original papers in the probate packets – all together – hooray for FHL), but am bogged down in land records. I am up to about 1720 but each volume has 20 to 40 ancestors’ deeds and I am so bored by it all…

To overcome the boredom, I’m shifting course to find more probate records in other New England counties. I’m presently making a list of all my Rhode Island ancestors and searching the RIGR for their will abstracts. I’ll then go to the town records (probates are in the towns in RI) and find the will transcriptions.

I love probate records!

Cheers — Randy

Next, I think is the problem of depending solely on birth, marriage, death and census records, then just winging the fuzzy bits. Bad move.

With those two factors alone, impacting on my early research, the product is very dodgy, and lends itself to building many many very short case problems about a half page in legth. These are the best length I think for classroom situations. I can make the cases sound more generic, to focus on particular principles.

The third major flaw of my early research was not recording the citations of the sources searched. I know now that the list of unsuccessful searches is as telling as the shorter list of sources yielding the critical facts sought.

Ken

The first five years are a blur now. I was so immersed in it and I collected so much…most of it secondary info. I did make xerox copies of books and journal articles, so I still have the info. And most of it was compiled, so I didn’t really attack the brick walls until after the 6th year. By then I had made plenty of mistakes and learned a lot. Over the last 10 years, I have looked critically at my database and supporting documents and have disconnected more than a few otherwise fine families from my ancestry.

I still have almost all of the brick walls, and I revisit them occasionally to see if someone else has solved them for me (nope! – they are all mine, I think). I made some forms to help me remember what materials I had searched for (eg, probate, land, tax, census, military, etc) and what internet databases I had searched. I only do this for my elusive ancestors (one of the problems of a fine New England ancestry is having several hundred surnames to search for – I’m not complaining! just stating fact), since they are the ones that need this level of critical thinking and analysis.

When you create a case study, do you take a relatively simple problem or are they as complicated as we find in NGSQ or NEHGR?

Cheers — Randy

Writing case studies, case problems is a skill but it can be learned. sounds like an idea for a future entry!
Ken

No, I haven’t, but it’s a good idea! Another one – you seem to have many! Too many for me to keep up with, so I’m going to cherry-pick as time marches on.

Are there any of these problems already defined, or have you compiled them yourself? The documents are the hard part, of course.

It seems to me that a prerequisite for doing this is some sort of course or workshop in problem solving, evaluating evidence, applying a proof standard, etc.

I think I will try to put a presentation together for my group on the this and I can use some of my research successes and frustrations as examples. I’ve touched on it before with them, but not to the extent of putting a presentation together.

I will review the articles I’ve downloaded from BCG and Ancestry and other sites and review my magazine collection for ideas. Any suggestions for books?

Cheers — Randy