Last month (Dec 15th) I was trying to catch up on some of the facts that I had been locating the past several weeks. This included several people whom I found in the 1940 and 1930 US Census records through FamilySearch and Ancestry.
I loved looking at all the cousins and their family members on these records, finding out what occupation each person was doing that year. I found several widowed mothers and fathers who were living with their grown children and grandchildren. I still have not located my own grandfather in the 1930 census, I found him in the 1920 and 1940 but not 1930...yet. I still hold out hope to find him soon. I have a couple of leads that I need to follow, he was serving his first term in the Army at the time.
I started to sync my RootsMagic tree to FamilySearch with all the residence information I had found so far. I also added Census and Occupation facts for each person I had found. I was making progress, but I soon realized that I needed a list of everyone that could have been found in the census to ensure that I had everyone. So I pulled a "who was there" report out of my RootsMagic database, this report will query everyone in the database against those who were born before and do not have a death date before 1930.
I soon started looking at each person listed on the report and eventually I found it easiest to put in report into Evernote. I could then use this basic report as the start of a research log. I started checking off each person that I found and adding the date I found the info.
By whittling away at the report every day, even if I had just 10-15 minutes to work on it, I knew eventually I would get through the 1148 people listed. After six weeks, I am beginning to really see some progress in my end goal of finding everyone in my database in the 1930 census that was alive at the time. As of today I have found 141 of those listed on the report. I also have added more than 50 new cousins to my database as well.
