Prepare your genealogical research

You will then have to prepare your genealogical research and build some sort of action plan.

Ancestris allows you to prepare a list of searches to be carried out, sorted by categories and by storage locations.

Search for event dates

The way to conduct genealogical research benefits from the development of genealogy.

• The development of surveys carried out by associations
• The important place taken by collaborative online uploads
• The digitization and online posting of civil and parish registers

Some genealogists in fact carry out their research by entering the dates of events (births, deaths, marriages ...), no longer from the original acts, but from either associative records or trees found on the Internet.

However, it is necessary to systematically verify all these dates by checking the original acts or their transcription, whether they are paper archives or digitized archives.

Now Ancestris is a powerful and efficient tool to facilitate the management of these searches or verifications.

Whenever you collect a dated event, after entering the event, we recommend that you first indicate the origin of this information, its source (genealogical association of such and such, tree found on this web site, etc.).

Then, we suggest that you add a property to this event to remind you to find the original document or piece of evidence of the deed concerned, or other tasks to be performed.

To do this, you can define a personalized property (example: "_TODO"), which value will be the task to be performed (example: "find the deed.").

The easiest way to do this is to use the Ancestris Gedcom editor. On the first line of properties, right-click to display the Context menu and choose the Gedcom Properties List. When the Add Property panel appears, activate the New Label radio button, and, in the box just below, enter a custom label starting with “_” (with, for example, a department name: “ _TODO ”), enter the value“ find the deed ”then validate by pressing <OK>.

Creation of a research sheet

At any time, Ancestris allows you quite easily to build a research sheet summarizing all the sources to check or actions to perform.

To do this, use the To Do List report, via the Tools / Lists and reports menu. When the view is displayed, left column, click on To Do List, then, at the top right, activate the Options tab.

In the Options panel, fill in the box defining the tasks to be searched for by your tag (for example "_TODO"), validate by clicking next to it.

Launch the report. Ancestris offers PDF as an output format by default. If you have few acts, you can choose PDF. Disadvantage: the resulting list is not ranked which might make it unpractical over several pages. To easily obtain a list classified by city for example, change the file type to “CSV” format instead of “PDF”.

Then open the "* .csv" file in a spreadsheet tool.

Delete the first header line “Complete list of to-do items” which is unnecessary.

All you have to do then is sort your table on the desired columns.

Your worksheet is sorted by city with the acts to be searched.

You can then create an additional column called "notes" to write down any issue.

With your sorted worksheet, you can now go to the website of the geographic archives repository and look for your deeds city by city.

Search for notarial deeds

To search for notarial deeds, the process is the same.

Whenever the date of a marriage contract is indicated in the text of a marriage, on a deed statement or on the Internet, enter it in your Ancestris genealogy, under tag "MARC", with the date and place, with the name of the notary under tag "AGNC".

Create a personalized label, for example “_NOTARIAL123”.

Configure the report seen above by changing the name of the tag sought by "_NOTAIRES123".

Run your report as in the example above.

With your beautiful notaries worksheet, you can go to check the elements at the local repository.

Eventually, if the notary register numbers are on the Internet, look them up from home and add them in an additional column on your work sheet.

By proceeding this way, with a minimum of preparation, you will have prepared your control work efficiently, whether from home or going physically to the corresponding repository offices, especially if you do not perform research every day and you do not want to end up with too many documents to verify at the same time.