Author: Donna

I’ve just posted the second ancestor bio on this website, this time of my grandfather, Harry Lee Rowland. And yet again, this turned out to be a very enlightening experience. I thought I’d done all my research on Harry, had lots of dates and places and names, as usual. But when it came down to weaving together a story about his life, I realized that there were gaps in my knowledge, especially in terms of coming up with either facts or hypotheses about why they lived where they did and why they moved when and where they did.

And what was really amazing to me is that these were gaps I’d never even noticed before — and I’ve been working on my family genealogy research for over 30 years!

My grandfather died when I was only 6 months old, so I never knew him, but I certainly heard lots of stories about him from my grandmother and dad. After writing this short bio, I feel that I know him a lot better now and appreciate all the struggles in his life and how he overcame them, just as his own father (my great-grandfather) did.

So thanks again to Yvette Hoitink, the Dutch genealogist who started examining how thorough her own personal research was (and then issuing her “Level Up!” challenge) and thanks to Dick Eastman who wrote about this in his weekly genealogy newsletter!

A couple of months ago, I read a fascinating blog post by Yvette Hoitink, a Dutch genealogist who decided to apply the principles of the Genealogical Proof Standard to her own family tree research. She developed an Excel spreadsheet and code to assess where she was in her work.

Once she filled in her 7-generation chart, she said she found it shocking to see where her personal research wasn’t at the professional level she would provide for clients. And she challenged her readers to do the same.

So I did. And yes, it was shocking, especially for the more recent generations. I supposed those are not filled in as much because these are people I actually knew or had heard a lot about by parents and grandparents who actually knew them. But I hadn’t filled in a lot of the blanks, especially in building a solid chronology of their lives and then writing up what I’ve found.

So I’m working on improving that, beginning with my great-grandfather, John Woods Rowland. You can see his initial bio here and also here (on my free WordPress site). There are still some blanks because records aren’t available online (which is how I need to find them at the moment). But it was a great start and really enlightening to see where the gaps were in his life story.

If you read this, please let me know what you think of the bio. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

I’m starting to experiment with different ways of letting people navigate around this website, especially as new family groups and new generations of people are being added. The challenge is that a navigational menu on the sidebar or top could end up being so long that it’s hard to deal with on a phone or iPad.

So I’m going to try posting ancestor charts for each of my great-grandparents so that visitors can see who’s where, in addition to gradually adding all-name indexes (with hyperlinks) to let you get where you want to go in the website.

I don’t know how to embed the hyperlinks into the charts themselves so will list the families on each page underneath the chart.

The first chart is for William Davis. I’m still adding pages with information on generations and families, so please be patient!

Click here to view the PDF in a larger format (or click on Download):