Elaborating on My Pyramid Stream Methodology

The Roots & Leaves Website: Always a work in progress as I think of ideas to present information and discover new plug-ins that can assist me in doing so. At present, the website consists of a home page, landing pages, category pages and the blog functionality. And, by integrating some traditional features like a glossary page with dynamic citations, along with interactive graphs to illustrate and visualize data sets that I find in my research, I hope to make my website both more engaging and interesting especially if I can integrate some Bullet Journal concepts.

The Blog Component: I try to write a blog post at least once a week, sometimes more often as time allows. The blog serves as the main research output tool of course, allowing me to elaborate on my thoughts, ideas, and research progress. The main themes I will write about include: world history, genealogy, and family history…and while these topics all focus on the past, it’s important to tie them to the present and create a meaningful record of my own life, and that of my immediate living family to really make the endeavor worthwhile and useful to future family generations. To that end, I will also write about my own life a little, along with current events. I guess this project will eventually encompass almost every topic under the sun…as long as I can keep it relevant to world, regional, local and family topics. So, in the spirit of Seinfeld…it’s a project about everything and nothing, all at once.

History: I have always enjoyed world history and the rich tapestry of multi-cultural influences on present day society. To that end, I will continue to write about historical events in a broader sense, but, also at the national, regional, and local levels…with the idea of using the knowledge learned to inform the research into the life and times of my past, present and future family members. I have also sprinkled in On This Day in History feeds to showcase historical events that occurred on any given day, and will incorporate this concept when preparing summaries of my ancestors.

The Genealogy Portal: Using The Next Generation web application, I have created my family genealogy portal with the aim of encouraging “cousin bait” and collaborating with other like-minded family historians who wish to fill in the gaps or expand on their own family trees. So, if we can find common ancestors, let’s collaborate on finding missing links and share photos, stories or records whenever possible.

RootsMagic: I’ve chosen RootsMagic as my offline genealogy software because it has so many features that make my life easier. Aside from the basic genealogy features which include: trees, reporting, and views (tree, person, family, ancestor, etc.), I appreciate how it syncs with subscription services like Ancestry and FamilySearch. This allows me to use RootsMagic as my central repository of genealogical data and I can sync it with my subscription services (in real-time) and the genealogy portal (through a monthly GEDCOM file update).

As much as I hate to admit it, paid subscriptions to Ancestry.com and other genealogy websites remain necessary, as a means to feed new leads into my ancestry tree (records, stories, photos, and DNA matches). The main genealogy websites I will focus on include: Ancestry.com, WikiTree.org, and FamilySearch.com. I may re-subscribe to Newspapers.com again, once I progress further in my research.

DNA Research: Without the objective data one gets from DNA research, all of the above leads one down the road of subjectivity. So, I hope that the science behind the DNA reports will lead to connections with ancestors that I can trust with some certainty…the Y-DNA and MtDNA DNA testing should help in this respect as I plug my DNA results into DNA research communities.

Family Research: This component really focuses on extracting family history from my immediate family in the form of stories, anecdotes, traditions, recipes, photos and memories. And it goes hand in hand with the final component…Family Interviews. I’m literally going to timeline everyone in my family to document where each person lived and what they did during that time of their lives.

Projects (formerly Family Interviews): The Projects component will consist of interviews, photo digitization, stories, archiving and other family projects. family interviews will serve as my primary resources for my family research and should provide more clues into my research in other areas, particularly the genealogy. I’m hoping that by gathering names, places, locations, and photos, and getting my family to talk about these artifacts, that their responses will provide me with rich content from which to draft my narratives.