Month: January 2017

I started a total do-over for my genealogy database last January. And by total, I mean total. I switched from using Family Tree Maker to Legacy Family Tree, and instead of importing my old tree from FTM, I opted to start fresh. I’m re-entering every single item by hand, and re-researching everyone and everything as I go.

This is not a sprint race. I occasionally look at my file properties, to see what sort of progress I’m making. It seems like the number of individuals only barely creeps upward, but on the other hand, everything is well researched. I have an average of 4.8 citations for each person, so what I’ve got is solid. That makes me happy.

I had a hell of a time finding this census record. I found an as yet unmarried Edward in the 1905 New York State census, and I found him with wife Mary, three children, and Mary’s mother in the 1920 United States Census. Both times he was living in Troy, New York. I thought it was unlikely (though possible) that they would have been living somewhere else at the time of the 1910 census, so I started searching for Edwards who were born in Ohio around 1878. Though you can see in the index entry that someone has corrected the spelling of the first name, it wasn’t coming up for me.

And obviously, searching for either Basquill or Basqu*l* wasn’t going to help, either. I finally left both name fields blank and searched Troy, Rensselear, New York for all people born in Ohio within five years of 1878. I thought that might be too big a net, but I was out of alternatives for narrowing it. It worked, though. There he was, with the last name of Pasquill. An easy mistake for an enumerator to make, because P and B sound similar.

Normally I’d switch to searching for one of the children or his wife, but the children were all born after the 1910 census, and I don’t yet know when he and Mary were married. Now that I’ve found them together in the 1910 census, I can narrow my guess for a marriage date to sometime between 1905 and 1910.