Associates

How do you track you genealogy FAN club?

Are there records that connect various members of your FAN (Friends, Associates and Neighbors) club? If so, how are you documenting those connections? A recent question on the Facebook group, Genealogy and Artificial Intelligence (AI) prompted me to reconsider how I document my Crawford FAN Club.

One comment on the post mentioned using ‘shared events’. This lead me to review how I manage some of these FAN club events in my RootsMagic file. For example, I have a source for the 1779 will of John Crawford in Montgomery County, Virginia. This will mentions his wife Rebekah, and witnesses James Crawford, Bazeleel Maxwell and George Douglass. Since Rebekah and the witnesses are members of my FAN club, I have shared the event with them.

This witnessed event does appear in a narrative report for the individual

Unfortunately, a timeline report does not include the witnessed event.

While the timeline report for a group can help document movement of the group, the report is incomplete without these shared events.

Based on how I’ve used shared events, they are useful when looking at an individual but not useful when working with a group such as a FAN club.

Thus, I started looking at other ways to potentially document these connections in RootsMagic. That’s when I remembered a feature from RootsMagic 9 that I had not implented: Associations.

After viewing the Associations video, I configured several for my Crawford FAN Club, including one for John Crawford’s will.

Besides the will, I also created Association events for a deed, two marriage license applications, and some tax and census records. These are a few of the records that tie together the three James Crawford lines found in Garrard County, Kentucky and connect them to other families in the area including Sellers, Douglass, Anderson and Dooley. The Association List Report (individual) will generate a list of these associations with three formatting choices for the output.

Using Rebekah Douglas as the starting individual, the report includes all three James Crawfords.

The narrative version of the Association report makes it easier to understand the relationships.

Unfortunately, the narrative version drops the individual’s number making it look like it is referring to one person named James Crawford.

This report is also seems to be one dimensional. For example, the narrative report for Rebekah Douglas indicates that Bazeleel Maxwell witnessed the will of John Crawford (her husband). However, it does not indicate that James Crawford also witnessed the will. Instead it says that James was an ‘associate’ of Bazeleel Maxwell.

Another issue with the narrative version of the report the inability to distinguish people of the same name. Without the numbers following the name, one could read this report and assume that all mentions of James Crawford refer to one individual instead of three.

While using the ASSOCIATES feature in RootsMagic will help me document my FAN club, it still does not convey all of the connections between the FAN club members.